Packaging INN for NixOS

[ghost]

Hello, just recently discovered Usenet as an open, free-as-in-freedom way to retrieve and publish textual information. I was born in the year 2000 and I'm just twenty years' late! I'm using Emacs/Gnus as my newsreader and using gwene unidirectional RSS-to-NNTP and gmane.io bidirectional mailing-list-to-NNTP service.

I would like to self-host INN with my GNU/Linux distribution of choice, which is NixOS. INN is currently not packaged for NixOS and I would like to do so. It mainly involves two steps:

• Package INN and its dependencies, which I have done in this pull request, mostly by following the installation guide. Please suggest changes in the pull request, as I am totally new to INN.
• Create a new configuration module for INN. This allows users to configure INN via the Nix interface alone, instead of editing many configuration files. An example would be the Nginx module. So where can I find a complete reference of all INN options?

Regards, Maurice

[Julien-Elie]

Hi Maurice, Thanks for helping in packaging INN on more distributions! I've had a look at your suggested script for NixOS packaging. It seems good to me. FWIW, if not already done, you can see what FreeBSD, Debian, Fedora or Arch Linux are doing, amongst other distributions. Be sure that the installed package is ready for use (history file created, right permissions, crontab with news.daily and a daily flush of incoming.conf as explained in the installation guide).

As for the configuration module as a GUI, that's a tough work as INN has many configuration files. The complete reference is the manual pages of each configuration file!

Do not hesitate to post any question you would have about configuration files in the news.software.nntp newsgroup, where you'll probably receive quick answers.

[ghost]

Thanks for the pointer to the manual pages, there's indeed quite a few options, thankfully each of them are documented in detail. I'll try to cover basic use-cases first.