Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Can somebody explain the anne.jones file?
Message-ID: <1990Apr6.172710.9662@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Apr6.051900.8956@woodt.uucp>
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 90 17:27:10 GMT

In article <1990Apr6.051900.8956@woodt.uucp> robert@woodt.uucp (Robert Sexton) writes:
>... Whoever
>put together the cnews scripts is a twisted, brilliant person...

Yeah, that's a fair description of Geoff. :-)  Inews and its auxiliaries
are his work, so I'll let him respond to the anne.jones question.  The
inews stuff is very flexible but is admittedly a bit hard to figure out.

>What is the role of the sys file?  I know it determines outgoing feeds,
>but it seems to have some control over incoming files, also.

The ME line in the sys file (or alternatively the line with a system name
identical to that of the system news is running on) determines which
groups your site subscribes to.  This is documented (!) (:-)) in the news.5
manpage.

>is there much use for the f flag in a sys entry?  I run a small site
>attached to a backbone, so I simple want to ship out locally generated
>articles...

The f flag is mostly useful for bulk feeds.  It's not going to make a big
difference to you if your site is mostly receive-only with little outgoing
traffic.

>It would seem that inews looks in the sys file to see who gets
>the article, but then what?  Does it write it's id in the togo file?

Well, more properly it's relaynews (called by inews and by newsrun) that
does all this.  Relaynews uses the sys file to decide who gets articles,
and then (in the presence of the f flag) writes the pathname of the article
and its length to the togo file for the batcher.  When the batcher gets
run, usually by cron, it consults the togo file and uses it to prepare
outgoing batches, picking up the actual articles and bundling them up
for transmission.

>I am very pleased with cnews.  It came up and ran with little or no help
>from me.  This is my first news admin, and things are going very well
>so far.  ( I am scrambling up the learning curve as best i can :-)

That's good to hear.  Our documentation definitely isn't set up well for
beginners; I'm glad that at least some are managing well even so.
-- 
Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Space station @ 8yrs:        .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
