InterNetNews
Getting rid of the special newsfeeds ME entry
A proposal from Russ Allbery:
There are three things you can configure in ME: Path aliases for your site that indicate you've already seen the article and don't want to accept it, default outbound feed patterns, and limitations on what distributions you want to accept.
The default outbound feed patterns do belong in newsfeeds, since they directly affect how all of the other patterns are interpreted. But they're more like the variables that newsfeed supports, except that all feeds add that variable at the start by default. I wonder if we should just declare some particular variable (FEED_PREFIX or something) special and let you set it to prepend that set of patterns to every feed.
The other two (Path aliases and what distributions to accept) really have nothing to do with the purpose of newsfeeds. We could just move both into incoming.conf, so that they can be set separately for different incoming feeds, which would be useful for some purposes.
Note that it will solve an issue raised by Urs Janßen who noted that the default ME entry rejects articles with a local distribution value in the Distribution header field, even though locally posted. It is not the expected behaviour mentioned in RFC 5536:
"local" is reserved for indicating distribution only to the local
site, as defined by local software configuration.
Configuring the distributions to accept from incoming peers in incoming.conf would be far better!
We'll then have to see how to prevent articles with a local distribution from being propagated: an option in inn.conf to allow/disallow the propagation of such articles? (Just recommending in the newsfeeds documentation and sample file to add this distribution to the exclusion list of sites will probably not be enough.)
The ME entry has been a source of pain for new INN administrators for a long time. I think the way Russ sums it up where its basically trying to do three things, two of which don't really make sense to occur in the newsfeeds file, is why it's difficult for many to fully comprehend.
I believe the FEED_PREFIX variable idea is what most people interpret the ME line to do and have a hard time with the rest of its purpose.
