News::Article - Object for handling Usenet articles in mail or news form. Copyright 1997 by Andrew Gierth . 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 is the first public ALPHA release. The interface is believed to be reasonably stable; the modules are in use in at least two different projects at this time. 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. There is no test suite. THANKS Thanks to Russ Allbery for comment and significant contributions. AUTHOR Andrew Gierth AVAILABILITY See http://www.erlenstar.demon.co.uk/perl END