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# control-archive

Copyright 2002-2004, 2007-2014, 2016-2018 Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>.
Copyright 2001 Marco d'Itri.  Copyright 1996 UUNET Technologies, Inc..
This software is distributed under a BSD-style license.  Please see the
section [License](#license) below for more information.

## Blurb

This software generates an INN control.ctl configuration file from
hierarchy configuration fragments, verifies control messages using GnuPG
where possible, processes new control messages to update a newsgroup list,
archives new control messages, and exports the list of newsgroups in a
format suitable for synchronizing the newsgroup list of a Netnews news
server.  It is the software that maintains the control message and
newsgroup lists available from ftp.isc.org.

## Description

This package contains three major components:

* All of the configuration used to generate a `control.ctl` file for INN
  and the `PGPKEYS` and `README.html` files distributed with pgpcontrol,
  along with the script to generate those files.

* Software to process control messages, verify them against that
  authorization information, and maintain a control message archive and
  list of active newsgroups.  Software is also included to generate
  reports of recent changes to the list of active newsgroups.

* The documentation files included in the control message archive and
  newsgroup lists on ftp.isc.org.

Manual changes to the canonical newsgroup list are supported in a way that
generates the same log messages and uses the same locking structure so
that they can co-exist with automated changes and be included in the same
reports.

This is the software that generates the [active newsgroup
lists](ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/) and [control message
archive](ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/) hosted on ftp.isc.org, and
the source of the `control.ctl` file provided with INN.

For a web presentation of the information recorded here, as well as other
useful information about Usenet hierarchies, please see the [list of
Usenet managed hierarchies](http://usenet.trigofacile.com/hierarchies/).

## Requirements

Perl 5.6 or later plus the following additional Perl modules are required:

* Compress::Zlib (included in Perl 5.10 and later)
* Date::Parse (part of TimeDate)
* Net::NNTP (included in Perl 5.8 and later)
* Text::Template

[gzip](https://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/) and
[bzip2](http://www.bzip.org/) are required.  Both are generally available
with current operating systems, possibly as supplemental packages.

process-control expects to be fed file names and message IDs of control
messages on standard input and therefore needs to be run from a news
server or some other source of control messages.  A minimalist news server
like tinyleaf is suitable for this (I wrote tinyleaf, available as part of
[INN](https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/), for this purpose).

## Versioning

This package uses a three-part version number.  The first number will be
incremented for major changes, major new functionality, incompatible
changes to the configuration format (more than just adding new keys), or
similar disruptive changes.  For lesser changes, the second number will be
incremented for any change to the code or functioning of the software.  A
change to the third part of the version number indicates a release with