News::Article - Object for handling Usenet articles in mail or news form.

Copyright 1997 by Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk>. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

MODULES

News::Article
News::AutoReply
News::FormArticle
News::FormReply

STATUS

This release is considered reasonably stable, both in functionality and interface.

INTRODUCTION

This module originated with the development of the software intended to handle newsgroup creation for the (new) mod.* Usenet hierarchy. The requirement to centralise, and fully automate, the process of group creation and the detection of defunct groups led to a large number of cases where the software would be required to read, parse, forward, reply to, mail and post articles of various forms.

Therefore, this module allows for creating articles from scratch, or reading them from various data sources; various header manipulations, and posting via NNTP or mailing via a sendmail-workalike.

Support is included for PGPMoose v1.1-compatible signatures, and also for control-message signatures believed to be compatible with current distributions of signcontrol and pgpverify.

FormArticle is a derivative, intended for the construction of news articles (or mail messages) by substitutions into boilerplate text. AutoReply and FormReply are additional (very simple) derivatives.

REQUIREMENTS

This probably won't work except on Unix or a very good imitation.

Net::Domain
Net::NNTP
PGP::Sign

(It would be nice to weaken these dependencies somewhat.)

Mailing articles requires a sendmail-workalike (normally /usr/lib/sendmail or /usr/sbin/sendmail).

INSTALLATION

Review the "System Dependent Configuration" section near the beginning of Article.pm. If it would fail to find a working sendmail on your system, and you care, then fix it as necessary.

Then follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules, which is to type the following commands:

        perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make install

You'll probably need to do the last as root. A testsuite (though not an extensive one yet) is supplied.

THANKS

Thanks to Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> for comment and significant contributions.

AUTHOR

Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk>

AVAILABILITY

CPAN, or see http://www.erlenstar.demon.co.uk/perl

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