control-archive

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea — massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

— Gene Spafford

Description

This package includes all of the software used to generate the ftp.isc.org active newsgroup lists and control message archive. It contains two major components:

• All of the configuration used to generate the control.ctl file distributed from ftp.isc.org and included in INN and the PGPKEYS and README.html files distributed with pgpcontrol, along with the script to generate those files. This information is used to maintain the ftp.isc.org list of active newsgroups.

• The software used to process control messages, verifying them against that authorization information, and maintain a control message archive and list of active newsgroups. Software is also included to generate reports of recent changes to the list of active newsgroups.

Manual changes to the canonical newsgroup list are also supported, in a way that generates the same log messages and uses the same locking structure so that they can co-exist with automated changes and be included in the same reports. Also included in this package are the documentation files included in the control message archive and newsgroup lists on ftp.isc.org.

Requirements

All of the software in this package is written in Perl and requires Perl 5.6 or later. The Perl modules Compress::Zlib, Date::Parse, Net::NNTP, and Text::Template are also required. Compress::Zlib is included in Perl 5.10 or later and otherwise available from CPAN. Date::Parse is part of the TimeDate distribution in CPAN. Net::NNTP is included in Perl 5.8 or later and otherwise available as part of the libnet distribution in CPAN. Text::Template is available from CPAN. Most Linux distributions have packages for the extra Perl modules.

gzip and bzip2 are required. Both are generally available with current operating systems, possibly as supplemental packages.

process-control expects to be fed file names and message IDs of control messages on standard input and therefore needs to be run from a news server or some other source of control messages. A minimalist news server like tinyleaf is suitable for this (I wrote tinyleaf, available from the current INN Subversion repository, for this purpose).

Download

The distribution:

Documentation:

• README
• To-do list
• Change summary
• License and copyright

Manual pages for main scripts:

• control-summary
• export-control
• generate-files
• process-control
• update-control

Additional scripts:

• parse-ctl

control-archive is maintained using the Git version control system. To check out the current development tree, clone:

    git://git.eyrie.org/usenet/control.git

You can also browse the current development source.

License

The primary license is:

Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of the authors not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. The authors make no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

This product includes software developed by UUNET Technologies, Inc.

process-control's license includes some additional restrictions around documentation and advertising. For complete copyright and license information, see the file LICENSE in the control-archive source distribution.