path: root/news/newsstar/pkg-descr

Newsstar fetches news and posts it to a local server; INN, s-news and sn are
supported, and it should be easy to adapt for other servers with some
configuration and extra scripts. It's designed for Unix-like systems, and all
the development was done on Linux.

There are already plenty of other programs to do this, but what makes newsstar
special is that it can make multiple simultaneous connections, not only to
one server, but to several, supporting up to 10 threads. Before fetching each
article it checks that it hasn't already been downloaded by another thread or
in a previous session. It can also pipeline article requests to make better
use of available bandwidth.

I wrote it because a number of ISPs I have used suffer from unreliable
newsfeeds. There is an excellent free server made available by
news.individual.net, but it can be a bit slow at times, and using external
servers uses more bandwidth. Therefore I wanted a program which could fetch
whatever articles my ISP has available, but use the foreign server to avoid
missing posts or getting them very late, and to do it as fast as possible.

WWW: http://newsstar.sourceforge.net/