PREFACE
=======
Original Author - Tim Smith (address unknown)
Maintainers:
March 1995     - Sven Goldt (goldt@math.tu-berlin.de)
July 1995      - Robert A. Yetman (bobyetman@sucknews.org)
September 2017 - Michael Vetter (jubalh@iodoru.org)

Current Maintainer - jubalh@iodoru.org

LOCATION
========
https://github.com/lazarus-pkgs/suck

INTRODUCTION
============
The primary use for suck is to feed a local NNTP server, without the
remote NNTP feeding you articles.  It is designed for a small, partial
news feed.  It is NOT designed to feed 10,000 groups and 3 Gigs of articles
a day.

This package contains software for copying news from an NNTP server to your
local machine, and copying replies back up to an NNTP server.  It works
with most standard NNTP servers, including INN, CNEWS, DNEWS, and typhoon.

The suck/rpost combination allows you to run your own  site, controlling
where you get your news, and where you post outgoing articles.  Suck/rpost
use only standard NNTP commands that are used by your favorite news reader
(tin, xvnews, strn) such as POST and ARTICLE.  If you can use tin or xvnews
against a NNTP site, than you can use Suck/Rpost.

suck			Pull a small newsfeed from an NNTP server

lpost			Gives one article fetched by suck to the local server.

rpost			Posts article(s) to a remote NNTP server

testhost		Check to see what commands your host recognizes or
				get the active or new list.

lmove 			put articles in news/group/number format.


LICENSING INFO
==============
Suck is Public Domain, feel free to make any changes you want, just don't
blame me when they break.

NOTES:
======
Suck will not work with obsolete NNTP servers that can't handle the xhdr
command.

This code assumes an ANSI-compliant compiler, it will NOT work with old
compilers which don't accept function prototypes.

The Makefile assumes you are using GNU make, other makes may or may not work.

If your remote INN server slows drastically after 100 messages are downloaded,
and they are using INN 1.5.1 or newer, chances are they compiled INN with
"LIKE_PULLERS" set to DONT, which causes INN to put a small sleep before each message.
Talk to the SA for the system and see if they'll compile with "DO".  Chances
are they didn't even know this option existed.

An interesting program for processing the killfile log and forcing suck to
download some of the articles in it can be found at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jvanerp/suckmore.html

Is suck Y2K compliant?  As far as I can make it yes.   The only program that uses
dates is testhost, and the date is sent to the remote NNTP host for the NEWGRP
command.  I don't do any date calculations.   Once servers take an 8 digit
date (right now its YYMMDD), I'll update testhost.

HOW-TO-USE
==========
0.  Run ./configure --help to see the options, especially the ones listed
        last (--with-inn-lib && with-inn-include)
1.  run ./configure
    If it can't find your Inn libraries/includes, make sure you use the
	--with-inn-lib=path & --with-inn-include=path options
2. Check over the Makefile, make sure it found everything, if not fix it.
    If your flatfile history file is not at /var/lib/news/history,
	you'll need to use the -HF option, to tell suck where it is.
    If you're using Inn 2.3 or newer, make sure the Makefile knows
	where your libinn.a and includes are, otherwise, the dedupe
	function won't work.  See step #4.  Typically, these are in
	the source tree.  If you don't have the source, get it,
	see below.
3.  If you're using SSL edit the Makefile step #nr7.
4.  Make it.  (make , make install)
    If you are having problems compiling suck, look at the Makefile,
	there are comments in there for the various common problems
	I see.
5.  READ THE MAN PAGES.
6.  Create a sucknewsrc - which groups to download (see suck man pg).
	If you have INND/CNEWS/DNEWS/PNEWS already running, then
	just use 'suck remotehost -A -hl localhost', and the sucknewsrc
	will be built for you.  BUT, before you do this, create a active.ignore
	file, listing all the groups on the local host that you don't want
	downloaded from the remote host (see man page for sample).
7.  Take a look at the sample directory.  There are two shell scripts
	 in there that show the whole scheme from how to download news
	(with suck), and how to upload news (with rpost).  Use get.news.inn
	if you have INN running, as it knows how to gracefully get the
	outgoing article listing.  get.news.generic is for everyone else.
	WARNING: These scripts need editing before you can use them.  You
	must change the various variables at the top of the scripts to
	ensure they point to the right files/directories.
	If you're using Inn 2.3.X with CNFS, you'll need to use
	the 'put.news.sm*' scripts, to deal with the tokens that
	Inn puts in the outgoing file instead of the article number.


WHERE TO GET STUFF
==================
inn: anonymous ftp from ftp.isc.org /isc/inn
perl: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/latest.tar.gz
      anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu /gnu
Perl/Tk: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-module/Tk/Tk8XX.XXX.tar.gz
SSL: http://www.openssl.org/

FUTURE PLANS.
========================

There are two GUIs now included with Suck.

1. perl/header.pl - This is a perl/Tk program to view articles
headers and add them to suckothermsgs.

2. java/Suck.class - This is a Java GUI for running a suck script.

See the README in each directory for more details.

Starting wich Suck-3.10.0, suck now supports a second type of killfiles.
The original killfiles have not changed, and are still fully supported.

In addition to the original killfiles, suck now supports killfiles
that are processed by on data received from the XOVER command, not
from the articles themselves.   The master killfile for this
set is called "suckxover".

Using the normal killfiles, suck would use the command XHDR to
get the MessageID numbers for each group, then download each
MessageID one at a time and check it against the killfiles, then
go onto the next message.  To check against the killfiles, I'd
first download the HEADER, check it, then if I needed to, download
the BODY.   Because of this, I can't buffer commands and
articles, so suck isn't very efficient.

This changes under the new killfiles.  With these, suck now uses
the XOVER command to get not only MessageIDs, but also the
From:, Subject:, References:, Lines:, and ByteCount at the same
time.  I can use this information to check against killfiles
without downloading the header or the body of the article.
To see which header fields your remote server supports via
XOVER, run testhost remosthost -o.  If you need the -M command
with suck, you'll probably need to run it as testhost remotehost
-o -M.

There are a few advantages to this approach.  The first is
I can get the XOVER information for an entire group at a time,
rather than one message at a time.  This should be more efficient
on the server.   Plus, if you are using the BODYSIZE commands in
killfiles, I don't have to download any of the message to kill it,
saving time and bandwidth.  In addition, I don't have to download
headers and bodies separate, and piece them back together.

Also, when downloading messages, if there are no killfiles, there
is pipelining code to make more efficient use of bandwidth.  Basically,
I'm sending article commands 1 ahead of the one I'm receiving, so
there should always be one waiting for me.

If you don't use NRGROUPS, HEADER, BODY, and stick with the
headers produced by the XOVER command, you should get quite
a performance boost, just by renaming suckkillfile to
suckxover.