
Description
-----------

This is the Perl 5 News-Scan distribution.  It requires perl version 5.004
or later.

This distribution provides a mechanism for collecting articles from a
set of Usenet newsgroups and then creating statistical reports about
those groups.

IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!
IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!  IMPORTANT!!!

This release of News-Scan is incompatible with prior releases.  This
should be considered alpha-quality software, so the internal
implementation is subject to change without notice, although I will
only make incompatible changes only when absolutely necessary.

Prerequisites
-------------

To use NewsScan, you need to have installed the following packages:

    TimeDate-#.##
    MailTools#.##
    IO-#.##

If you want to collect articles from an NNTP server, you'll also need
to install

    libnet-#.##

Installation
------------

Install NewsScan by running the following commands:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make install

Examples
--------

Please see the eg/ directory after you have unpacked the distribution
for examples of using this library to gather and report statistics for
Usenet newsgroups.

Bugs, Problems, Suggestions
---------------------------

Please send any suggestions, bug reports, complaints, et cetera to
Greg Bacon <gbacon@hiwaay.net>.

Acknowledgements
----------------

This software is based on Mike Lee's <mikey@ontek.com> posters
distribution and also on software posted to comp.lang.perl.misc
by Christian Murphy <cpm@muc.de>.

Many, many thanks are also in order to Gary Niemcewicz <gniemcew@dti.net>
for all his helpful thoughts, comments, and bug reports.

Chaim Frenkel <chaimf@cris.com> has also contributed immensely with his
extremely helpful comments, suggestions, and questions.

Thanks to Henrik Gemal, Gerrit P. Haase, and Oyvind Gronnesby for
helpful suggestions and bug reports.

Copyright
---------

Copyright (c) 1997-2002 Greg Bacon.
This library is free software; you can distribute and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.
