This is an old bug forwarded to your new bug tracking system Yes I know, few people still do news over UUCP, but for the few that might try, here are a couple of fixes: 1) the permission on /usr/lib/news/rnews are wrong (as per the INN FAQ). It should be 6555 uucp.news because without this rnews can't write in the UUCP spool areas (4555 may be enough though) 2) magic:~# less /usr/lib/news/bin/sendbatch.diff --- sendbatch.orig Thu Sep 17 13:19:55 1998 +++ sendbatch Thu Sep 17 13:20:44 1998 @@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ cat ${SITE}.work >>${BATCHFILE} rm -f ${SITE}.work if [ ! -s ${BATCHFILE} ] ; then - echo "${PROG}: No articles for ${SITE}." + #echo "${PROG}: No articles for ${SITE}." rm -f ${LOCK} continue fi sendbatch has to be run by news to queue outgoing news, but without this patch, if there are no messages, you get an Email. This used to be acceptable for sites who had a newsfeed for a bunch of users and only synced a few times a day, but when you use uucp over tcp and run the queue every 10 minutes, the mails quickly get annoying...
stole the bug
I have fixed the first bug (permissions problem) as of inn-2.2-5, but I am not going to change the second one. As you said, whether you want the mail or not is highly variable depending on how often you do your news synchronization. At red hat we are more in favor of providing verbosity and letting the user configure for brevity than the other way around in most circumstances. In this case, the output could be squelched with a simple modification to the cron job or, as you have, directly editing the shell script. However, I don't think it would be wise for us to change this behaviour, as some people may have been relying on it for quite some time for their sysadmin monitoring scripts, etc.