GroupSTAT 0.12.1 review

GroupSTAT generates statistics from a local Usenet news spool. Recently, I seem to have become the unofficial stats maintainer for r

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 22K Developer: Alex LaHurreau

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GroupSTAT generates statistics from a local Usenet news spool.
Recently, I seem to have become the unofficial stats maintainer for rec.arts.drwho. The program that I have been using to generate these stats, StatNews, was inadequate for the job. I thought about making a few alterations to it and sending a patch to the maintainer (Davide Salvetti), but after looking over the source code to StatNews, I decided that it would be easier to start over and do a complete re-write, using StatNews's source as a cheat-sheet for certain aspects of the project.

So, I set about writing this new program. I did a little research, and found the News::Scan Perl module (available on CPAN or from the author's website. The News::Scan module allowed me to write a program to get the stats without having to actually look at any news articles. This made my job a lot easier.

I have tried to make GroupSTAT as portable as possible. This program has been (for the most part) designed and tested under Debian GNU/Linux woody, and may not work on other platforms. This should be considered a bug; if you have problems getting it to work on your flavor of Unix, please tell me.

Requirements:
First of all, this program requires a semi-recent version of Perl. See the Portability section for information about platform compatability.

It also requires that your keep all of your news articles in separate text files in a directory on the computer you wish to run GroupSTAT on. If that computer does not have a news server running on it, you will probably have to use the getnews program (included). Just run getnews for a list of options.

GroupSTAT also requires the following non-standard Perl modules:
News::Scan - Available from CPAN, or from the author's web site
Mail::Address - Available from CPAN, or in the Debian package mailtools
Net::NNTP - Only necessary when using getnews. Available from CPAN, or in the

What's New in This Release:
Fixed a bug which would cause GroupSTAT to fail whenever you selected more than one group. This is NOT related to News::Scan.