Re: [Monotone-devel] Silly newbie question

[graydon hoare]

Steven Lusk <address@hidden> writes:

>   I'm afraid that i'm asking a question that's in the manual, or the
> FAQ, but i couldn't find it anywhere.  Apologies if my investigative
> skills are sub-par.  Feel free to rtfm me.
> 
>   How do i get monotone to post to an nntp server?

the "post" command's semantics are "try to post everything which is
currently queued". I guess we need to change the docs to make that
more clear. looking at your question, though, it's obvious that
"post" should also take optional arguments to limit itself to only
posting some of the queued material, rather than all of it. I'll make
that change.

in any case, the underlying question is "how do you get monotone to
queue packets to an nntp server?", to which the answer is..

> function get_post_targets(branchname)
>    return { {"nntp://news.somedomain.org";, "myproject"} }
> end

pretty much that. substitute some real newsgroup name for "myproject",
but otherwise yeah.

>   There is a great tutorial on getting depot.cgi running in the info
> docs, but nothing on nntp.  Some explicit examples would be very
> nice.  :)

agreed. I figured depots would be more popular, but it needs
elaboration. we really need quite a few more tutorial and reference
sections in the manual.

>   As an aside, i was wondering why the aforementioned .monotonerc
> code is in that file.  In general, i expect that a person would
> associate a project with a particular server, which implies to me
> that this information could go in a projects MT directory.

the code is a hook, and the hook's parameter is a branch name. the
idea was that a branch name would be generally unique across projects
-- not that we're setting a good example using "monotone", but I hope
to change that to net.venge.monotone shortly -- and you'd write that
function somewhat like a switch statement if you were working on
multiple projects.

this isn't cast in stone though. if it feels awkward, it feels
awkward, and that's a fact. we'll try to change it to be "least
surprising", so getting this sort of feedback about what seems
surprising is valuable. thanks.

>   Last but not least, does monotone support nntps?  If not, any
> suggestions on how to pipe it through openssl?

no, though it's not omitted by intent. I'd also like to support SSH
tunnels and proxies and whatnot.. so unless SSL proves to be a real
simple integration task, I'll probably wind up trying to put together
some lua hooks to return a "connection URL" for a given "target URL",
and/or possibly give lua the chance to open up the tunnel on its
own. haven't worked out precise details, but suggestions are welcome.

for the time being, you ought to be able to do it just by putting an
ssl client tunnel up on your own, to the nntps port (563) on the news
server, eg:

 openssl -c -d 8563 news.isp.com:563

and then using nntp://localhost:8563 as your URL. not an ideal
solution for the future, but it should work with what we currently
have code for.

-graydon