News::Article - Object for handling Usenet articles in mail or news form.

    Copyright 1997 by Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk>.
    All rights reserved.
    This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or 
    modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

MODULES

  News::Article
  News::AutoReply
  News::FormArticle
  News::FormReply

STATUS

  This release is considered reasonably stable, both in functionality
  and interface.

INTRODUCTION

  This module originated with the development of the software intended
  to handle newsgroup creation for the (new) mod.* Usenet hierarchy.
  The requirement to centralise, and fully automate, the process of
  group creation and the detection of defunct groups led to a large
  number of cases where the software would be required to read, parse,
  forward, reply to, mail and post articles of various forms.

  Therefore, this module allows for creating articles from scratch, or
  reading them from various data sources; various header
  manipulations, and posting via NNTP or mailing via a
  sendmail-workalike.

  Support is included for PGPMoose v1.1-compatible signatures, and
  also for control-message signatures believed to be compatible with
  current distributions of signcontrol and pgpverify.

  FormArticle is a derivative, intended for the construction of news
  articles (or mail messages) by substitutions into boilerplate text.
  AutoReply and FormReply are additional (very simple) derivatives.

REQUIREMENTS

  This probably won't work except on Unix or a very good imitation.

  Net::Domain
  Net::NNTP
  PGP::Sign

  (It would be nice to weaken these dependencies somewhat.)

  Mailing articles requires a sendmail-workalike (normally
  /usr/lib/sendmail or /usr/sbin/sendmail).

INSTALLATION

  Review the "System Dependent Configuration" section near the
  beginning of Article.pm. If it would fail to find a working sendmail
  on your system, and you care, then fix it as necessary.

  Then follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules,
  which is to type the following commands:

        perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make install

  You'll probably need to do the last as root.  A testsuite (though not
  an extensive one yet) is supplied.

THANKS

  Thanks to Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> for comment and
  significant contributions.

AUTHOR

  Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk>

AVAILABILITY

  CPAN, or see http://www.erlenstar.demon.co.uk/perl

END
