This is an intelligent batcher for INN. The comments say that it is like
the cnews batcher, though I haven't seen that one yet.


What is going on?
=================

For outgoing feeds, INN writes for each news-article one line into
/var/spool/news/out.going/${SITE}. The different sites are configured
in /var/lib/news/newsfeeds. Those news-article must be read again,
"batched" together and given to the uucp system.
If you have lots of uucp-systems and they all want to read lots of
news, you must have a big uucp-partition to keep the batches for one
or two days.

This batcher only batches 100 KB for each uucp system and then waits
until the system makes a uucp call. uucp will start uploading the
100 KB pre-batches and a background-process will batch the rest of
those news-batches.

You safe lots of disk space and the calling machine should no have
to wait for uucp batches, as there are already finished batches
waiting for it.


How to compile/install this batcher:
====================================

- make; su; make install


How to configure your system for this batcher:
==============================================
- You can configure the compression/max number of batches and the maximum
  size of a batch file in "/etc/uucp/batchparms".
- Copy all programs from /usr/doc/packages/batcher/bin/* to /etc/uucp/bin.
  (These should be the programs that uucp-sites are allowed to execute.)
  You should have the following lines in "/etc/uucp/sys":
	called-chat-program /etc/uucp/bin/incoming \Z
	command-path /etc/uucp/bin
	commands ALL
  This will let the uucp-Systems execute all programs in /etc/uucp/bin.
  Whenever a system starts a uucp-connection, /etc/uucp/bin/incoming
  ist started with the name of the system as first parameter. (\Z)
- send-batches tries to find all connected sites by looking into
  /var/spool/news/out.going/. If you want send-batches to not take
  care of all those feeds, you should list the sites as arguments
  to send-batches: "sendbatches site1 site2 site3".
- Put the following line into /etc/crontab:
  20 * * * * news /usr/lib/batcher/send-batches
  (Calls send-batches every hour to check the news batches.)


Florian La Roche	florian@knorke.saar.de

