Notes for the Debian leafnode package:

Configuration
-------------

See the leafnode(8) manual page and the sample configuration file for
documentation of the configuration file /etc/news/leafnode/config.

If you place any login and password information required to access
servers in the config file be sure to check that the permissions on that
file do not allow people to see this information who shouldn't be able
to.

Network connection type
-----------------------

The Leafnode package can be configured for use on two kinds of network 
connection - PPP and permanent.  The option chosen controls when
fetchnews is run.  If you select PPP, it will be started every time you
bring up a PPP connection (or any other type of network connection which
runs the scripts in /etc/ppp).  Otherwise, it will be run hourly from the
cron.d scripts.  The setting can be changed running 'dpkg-reconfigure
leafnode'.

Naturally, if neither option does exactly what you want you can edit the
relevant scripts and configuration files as you see fit.

If you select PPP fetchnews will automatically be terminated whenever a
PPP connection is brought down.  If you do not want this to happen (for
example, if you have multiple PPP connections open at once) you should 
comment out the line beginning "/bin/kill" in /etc/ppp/ip-down.d/leafnode. 
If there is sufficient demand this setup will be made an option in the
configuration.

This selection was introduced in version 1.9.4-6 of this package.  If
you upgrade from a previous version you will be asked which setting you
would like to use, but in order for your selection to take effect you
need to install the new cron.daily and PPP scripts.  If you didn't do so
when you installed the dpkg will have saved the new scripts with the
same filename as the files they are inteded to preplace plus dpkg-dist.
You can either copy the files over the old ones or make the appropriate
changes by hand.

Low volume newsgroups
---------------------

One common problem with Leafnode is very low volume newsgroups, which
get marked as unread since posts are less frequent than the time taken
to mark the group unread.

This package includes the touch_newsgroup script, which can be used
to keep these low-volume newsgroups marked as read.  By default, the
script will be run daily and will keep the groups listed in
/etc/news/leafnode/touch_groups (if it exists) marked as read.  It
requires perl 5 and the Net::NNTP module, avalible in the perl5 and
libnet-perl pacakges.

 -- Mark Brown <broonie@debian.org>

As upstream likes to fix problems with very low volume newsgroups,
please file a bug if you feel the need to use touch_newsgroup and
explain the circumstances.

 -- Robert Grimm <rob@robgri.de>
