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+Why not innfeed ?
+
+Two reasons:
+
+1. innfeed is not reliable[1]. In particular, the program feed
+ protocol spoken between innd and innfeed is lossy: if innfeed dies
+ unexpectedly, articles which innd has written to the pipe to
+ innfeed will be skipped. innd has no way of telling which articles
+ those are, no useful records, and no code to retry. I can see no
+ sensible way to solve this problem without using a different
+ approach to getting articles from innd.
+
+ [1] By "reliable" I mean that articles will be propagated unless
+ either (a) there is some deliberate policy or technical reason
+ why they are not or (b) transient problems prevent the
+ propagation from succeeding before the article expires.
+
+2. Why not just edit innfeed ? Well, innfeed is an very large program
+ for what it does - nearly 25kloc.
+
+So I set out to write something similar but smaller and reliable.