Re: News site for Free Software people?
Drop a line to Roger Dingledine, he was looking at setting up a
distributed news service and has done some work on it with a fair amount
of people from around the industry. I'll attach the initial post from it-
I think the URLs should still be active. There was a good amount of
follow up discussion on the technology to be used etc. as well.
Nils.
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Lightweight news server for Linux News Project?
Organization: Simple End-User Linux Project (www.seul.org)
I'm working on the Linux News Project, and I'm hoping to get advice on
lightweight, robust, and simple nntp servers. Our project's goal is to
create a more structured environment for reading and submitting Linux
news (such as information about new software releases, or articles
about Linux advocacy), through standardization of news storage/sharing
format and a fast robust mechanism for sharing news between
participating sites. So far, Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net),
Threepoint (http://threepoint.com), Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net),
and several smaller news services are very interested in participating
if we can get it to work well, and they're interested in putting some
time into designing it as well.
I have decided that an NNTP-based mechanism to keep news synchronized
between the servers is the way to go. However, most news servers I've
looked at are either too bulky and intensive (eg INN, C News) or too
specific or fragile (eg Leafnode). What we want is a simple NNTP-based
transfer method (such as the Net::NNTP perl module) combined with a simple
server that spools, expires, maintains several distinct newsgroups (perhaps
several dozen), supports pgp authentication, and figures out which news
items should be sent to which other servers and does it. Ideally, it
would also have hooks to call scripts when new news arrives. It doesn't
need to be very configurable, but it needs to be lightweight and secure.
In our case, it won't be connected at all to the rest of Usenet.
I feel certain that something like this has already been created, or at
the least is currently being worked on. I would very much prefer to use
existing software on this, since it will have an author and a user base
who has presumably tested much of it already. Our website is at
http://linuxunited.org/projects/news/ where you'll find a lot more
information about our plans and discussions. Please let me know if you can
help out in any way.
Thanks,
--Roger (arma@mit.edu)
In message <[🔎] 19990201222609.A1536@lalo.ddns.org>, Lalo Martins writes:
>[Please don't follow up in debian-devel; I'm not subscribed to
>this one and also it's not the right place for this discussion.
>I'm only bringing it up there because more people read it, but
>people there who want to follow the thread may subscribe to
>debian-publicity which is the correct place]
>
>I'm growing more dissatisfied with Slashdot everyday.
>Interesting news articles are getting sparser, comments rarely
>don't turn into flamewars (and the number of comments that
>directly oppose the concept of Free Software itself is
>disturbingly big and increasing), and even the polls are getting
>more and more dull. Now Rob is a very fine person but I don't
>think Slashdot is serving my purposes anymore, and I've seen a
>lot of comments from people who feel the same.
>
>Anyone reading this is interested in somehow helping with
>setting up a brand-new online news service, explicitly commited
>with Free Software? I'd specially love this place to have any
>kind of support from Debian and GNU, even if it's only a link
>somewhere in their homepages.
>
>In case this project really happens, it's open to discussion
>whether it should use Slash or something entirely different;
>personally, I don't see too much of a reason to store online
>news and discussion in a SQL database, and even if there are
>such reasons this project should of course use a free server
>(not mysql).
>
>[]s,
> |alo
> +----
>--
> I am Lalo of deB-org. You will be freed.
> Resistance is futile.
>
>http://www.webcom.com/lalo mailto:lalo@webcom.com
> pgp key in the web page
>
>Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org
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