6.2.2 News Spool

Subscribing to a foreign group from the local spool is extremely easy, and might be useful, for instance, to speed up reading groups that contain very big articles—‘alt.binaries.pictures.furniture’, for instance.

Anyway, you just specify nnspool as the method and "" (or anything else) as the address.

If you have access to a local spool, you should probably use that as the native select method (see Finding the News). It is normally faster than using an nntp select method, but might not be. It depends. You just have to try to find out what’s best at your site.

nnspool-inews-program

Program used to post an article.

nnspool-inews-switches

Parameters given to the inews program when posting an article.

nnspool-spool-directory

Where nnspool looks for the articles. This is normally /usr/spool/news/.

nnspool-nov-directory

Where nnspool will look for NOV files. This is normally
/usr/spool/news/over.view/.

nnspool-lib-dir

Where the news lib dir is (/usr/lib/news/ by default).

nnspool-active-file

The name of the active file.

nnspool-newsgroups-file

The name of the group descriptions file.

nnspool-history-file

The name of the news history file.

nnspool-active-times-file

The name of the active date file.

nnspool-nov-is-evil

If non-nil, nnspool won’t try to use any NOV files that it finds.

nnspool-sift-nov-with-sed

If non-nil, which is the default, use sed to get the relevant portion from the overview file. If nil, nnspool will load the entire file into a buffer and process it there.