Re: Why to switch from leafnode?

On Monday 23 May 2005 18:27, Matej Cepl wrote:
> I am somehow happy user of leafnode, but I would love to move most of my
> email lists to the local news server. Being kind of scared of beta version
> of Leafnode 2.* (which has been beta for last couple of years :-)) and
> missing Debian packages, I began to search for alternatives to leafnode.
> Noffle looks good, but may I ask members of this list (are there any? list
> seems to be quite dead :-)) for their testimony with noffle and how does it
> compare with leafnode (ease of use, mail2news gateway, speed), please?

There are Noffle users. Noffle at the moment suffers from a maintainer (me) 
with insufficient time to look after it properly. To be honest, this is 
largely because Noffle doesn't give me problems. I've been meaning to release 
current CVS as 1.2.0 for some months now, but Real Life has kept pushing it 
down the to do list.

I've never seriously used Leafnode. I found and downloaded it before Noffle a 
few years back, when I was looking for a lightweight news server that 
supported local groups. I looked at adding them to Leafnode, but working with 
the Leafnode code was hideously painful. Indeed Markus Enzenberger, Noffle's 
original author, was also the original author of the 'delaybody' option in 
Leafnode, but wrote Noffle after dispairing of the Leafnode code.

I've never done a side-by-side comparison with Leafnode. I think Noffle may be 
a little easier to work with, and it offers options Leafnode doesn't (and 
vice-versa; for example, Noffle's local group support is pretty longstanding 
by now, but Noffle doesn't have IPv6 support yet). The chief difference 
between the two you are likely to notice is that given multiple upstream 
servers Noffle doesn't at present fetch the same group from multiple servers 
for a combined feed; groups only ever come from one server. Internally, the 
big difference is that Leafnode uses a traditional /var/spool/news filestore 
(with custom additions). Noffle stores all articles in a gdbm file. This has 
the disadvantage that the total news base size can't exceed a smidge under 
2Gb. Noffle, I think, may be a bit better in environments where multiple 
client access the server at once; the code works quite hard at minimising the 
time the newsbase is locked and handling locks efficiently. Noffle also 
supports basic authentication, which I don't think Leafnode does.

Hope that helps, somewhat. Let me know if you have questions, and I'll do my 
best to answer them, though I'm afraid I probably won't be able to attend to 
them properly until next week (stuck in hotel without sensible net access).
-- 
Jim Hague - [email protected]          Never trust a computer you can't lift.


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