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.