🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm thinking about writing something to work in a similar way to overkill 
but with a few enhancements, I was looking for a few ideas about what 
others might want, as well as comments on what I think I want.

For the uninitiated, overkill takes the batch.txt output from KA9Q where 
some news articles have been killed (and are therefore present as headers 
only), and strips the headers out of batch.txt before it is unbatched.

My problem is that some things I've killed I want to stay killed (and 
therefore stripped out of batch.txt) whereas other things I'd like to 
keep the headers (to make a decision about whether to get them or not).

I still, however, like headers kept seperate from normal news.

One option I though about was rewriting headers' Newsgroups: line so that 
unbatch unbatches them into groups like demon.service.hdr (assuming that 
such a group has been created, presumably as a suspended group).

Other options are more straightforward, such as specifying which headers 
to remove from batch.txt, and which to leave as the are (and, maybe, 
which to write to a separate file altogether).

Another option was to "summarise" all 'killed' headers into a fake 
posting so that I could at least gauge how many articles are being killed 
(I'm not sure how best to summarise, though). That way, all killed 
headers would appear in some form in the newsbase, but not scattered 
around as they are at the moment. 

In addition, I can see no reason not to automatically generate a GET file 
in cases where the KA9Q killfile isn't flexible enough to do what is 
necessary, although specifying articles to "get" would be tricky. (For 
example, "References: *@holly.demon.co.uk*" might be expected to retrieve 
any article with a reference to one of mine in the header, but in fact 
won't catch articles where the References: line has been split into 
multiple lines - the post processor could spot that and "get" the 
article itself.)

I may also consider other post-processing abilities, such as rewriting 
multiple References: lines into single lines for newsreaders which can't 
cope with split lines, etc. Perhaps also some way of highlighting posts 
where the From/Reply-To: address don't match up to the X-NNTP-Posting-
Host: line might be useful. I'm sort of thinking on my feet here, which 
is why I was looking for other ideas in case I should ever find the time 
to put the time into it.

Mark.
-- 
int MeaningOfLife (void) { return 42; }   // mcr@holly.demon.co.uk
function MeaningOfLife :integer; begin MeaningOfLife := 6 * 9 end;