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I view a programming language as a place to be explored, like Disneyland. You don't need to have a lot of preparation to explore a theme park. You do have to go along with the crowd control measures, though. In a sense, each ride has its own prerequisites — if you cut in line, you risk getting tossed out of the park.
What we have here in this newsgroup is a failure in crowd control. Reading the FAQ is like staying in line — it's something you should learn in kindergarten. Usenet needs a better kindergarten.
— Larry Wall
I used to use the excellent auto-faq package to post FAQs when I first started needing to post several of them and needed more capabilities than just piping something into inews periodically. After using it for a while, though, I decided that I wanted to encode a few things specific to the way that I manage FAQs, and auto-faq was a bit too general for me. Hence this program.
postfaq does the standard things one would expect from a FAQ posting program: post a file to a news server, generate appropriate Expires headers, add a Supersedes header for the last posting of the FAQ, and thread a set of related FAQs into a single thread when posted. It also understands CVS revision Id lines at the beginning of the file and can generate a Last-modified subheader automatically from them, and unlike auto-faq it expects to find the headers and subheaders in the FAQ file rather than getting them from a configuration file.
auto-faq remains a more general solution to this problem, but postfaq is simpler and does some interesting things that I want for my FAQs.
Perl 5.001 or later and the Net::NNTP and Net::Domain modules (both of
which are included in core as of Perl 5.8.0 and are part of the libnet
distribution on CPAN). Access to a news server is required to actually
post FAQs, and it is assumed that Net::NNTP is configured correctly to
point to your local news server by default (otherwise, use -s) and
that your system is configured properly so that the hostfqdn() function of
Net::Domain will return a reasonable hostname for your system.
The program:
| postfaq 1.17 | 2013-01-09 | Download |
Copyright 1999, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2013 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. This means that you may choose between the two licenses that Perl is released under: the GNU GPL and the Artistic License. Please see your Perl distribution for the details and copies of the licenses.
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