inews requires that /etc/news/inn.conf exist. The only information it needs from this file is the name of the news server. This is silly. from bug# 6003 ======= The code should be fixed to send the article at hand to the server listed in /etc/nntpserver,$NNTPSERVER or something on the command line to Pnews (defaulting to "news" if none is present). ======= I actually have time to work on a patch to do this. So, I'll work on that and submit it to redhat (in this bug) and to isc for inclusion in the next version of the INN source. Also, inews should be it's own component.
after looking at the source and how it's organized, there's not a good way to add this functionality to inews. The problem is in posting articles on a client machine that doesn't have inn installed. It appears that the best fix for this is to write a replacement for inews that can be used by Pnews for posting news. There is not a Pnews component, so It probably needs to be changed to the trn component. I'll investigate changing Pnews to use inews if it exists, or use another program instead. (shouldn't be too difficult, but might require Net::NNTP perl module) I'll change the component and the summary to match the above notes.
found solution to problem. it involves changes to the file layout in the (broken) inn rpm. INN should have it's own inews, preferably in /usr/local/news/bin, or since redhat has an aversion to rpms in /usr/local, perhaps it should lie in /usr/news/bin instead (along with all the other inn related programs). the inews that comes with the TRN package solves this problem. it behaves as it should, and therefore should be included with the trn package. for more info on the proper trn package, please refer to http://sourceforge.net/projects/trn This bug is now an RPM layout problem. the base directory of INN needs to be changed and the full TRN package needs to be shipped. Although TRN is currently 4.0Beta, this shouldn't be a problem. When wanting to ship beta products, just Refer to Alan's explaination of why the gcc beta was shipped. TRN 4.0 is the best trn out there for your customers, therefore it should be shipped.
inews from inn-2.3.1 should work much better without the rest of the inn nstalled. Can yu test if that newest inews works for you without having inn installed?
the inews from INN 2.3.1 worked without libraries or config files from the rest of INN being installed. I've tested it using the NNTPSERVER environment variable to determine the news server. I'll look at the code this afternoon and see what other options there are for determining the server and test those (although I'm sure they'll work, it's mainly to see if I need to add any). At that point, I'll comment the bug again, and change it's status to resolved currentrelease with a note that it's the release if INN that fixed inews.
Ok, the current inews rpm is changed to not depend on inn