5 1. innfeed is not reliable[1]. In particular, the program feed
6 protocol spoken between innd and innfeed is lossy: if innfeed dies
7 unexpectedly, articles which innd has written to the pipe to
8 innfeed will be skipped. innd has no way of telling which articles
9 those are, no useful records, and no code to retry. I can see no
10 sensible way to solve this problem without using a different
11 approach to getting articles from innd.
13 [1] By "reliable" I mean that articles will be propagated unless
14 either (a) there is some deliberate policy or technical reason
15 why they are not or (b) transient problems prevent the
16 propagation from succeeding before the article expires.
18 2. Why not just edit innfeed ? Well, innfeed is an very large program
19 for what it does - nearly 25kloc.
21 So I set out to write something similar but smaller and reliable.