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

Blurb

This software generates an INN control.ctl configuration file from hierarchy configuration fragments, verifies control messages using GnuPG where possible, processes new control messages to update a newsgroup list, archives new control messages, and exports the list of newsgroups in a format suitable for synchronizing the newsgroup list of a Netnews news server. It is the software that maintains the control message and newsgroup lists available from ftp.isc.org.

Description

This package contains three major components:

• All of the configuration used to generate a control.ctl file for INN and the PGPKEYS and README.html files distributed with pgpcontrol, along with the script to generate those files.

• Software to process control messages, verify 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.

• The documentation files included in the control message archive and newsgroup lists on ftp.isc.org.

Manual changes to the canonical newsgroup list are 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.

This is the software that generates the active newsgroup lists and control message archive hosted on ftp.isc.org, and the source of the control.ctl file provided with INN.

For a web presentation of the information recorded here, as well as other useful information about Usenet hierarchies, please see the list of Usenet managed hierarchies.

Requirements

Perl 5.6 or later plus the following additional Perl modules are required:

• Compress::Zlib (included in Perl 5.10 and later)
• Date::Parse (part of TimeDate)
• Net::NNTP (included in Perl 5.8 and later)
• Text::Template

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

GnuPG 1.4.20 or later is required to import keys and verify signatures. This package does not yet work with GnuPG 2.x.

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 as part of INN, for this purpose).

Download

The distribution:

An archive of older releases is also available.

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

    https://git.eyrie.org/git/usenet/control-archive.git

Pull requests on GitHub are welcome. You can also browse the current development source.

Documentation

User documentation:

• README
• Change summary
• control-summary manual page
• export-control manual page
• generate-files manual page
• process-control manual page
• update-control manual page
• License and copyright

Developer documentation:

• To-do list
• GitHub
• Bug tracker

License

The control-archive package as a whole is covered by the following copyright and license:

Copyright 2002-2004, 2007-2014, 2016-2021 Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>

Copyright 2001 Marco d'Itri

Copyright 1996 UUNET Technologies, Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This product includes software developed by UUNET Technologies, Inc.

Some individual source files are covered by other, compatible licenses. For complete copyright and license information, see the file LICENSE in the control-archive source distribution.