Gmane

Gmane Software

Gmane is a service more than a software collection, and as such uses a lot of different components that haven't been written especially for Gmane, like inn, exim, php, Apache and chart.

This page lists the software written specifically for Gmane. It has not been written with distribution in mind, but is site-specific. It is provided here for your delectation, but it most likely won't work for you without a lot of work to whip it into shape.

Gmane mail-to-news scripts

If you wish to set up something like Gmane yourself, the Gmane scripts can be found here. They are very rough at the moment, and will probably take quite a bit of work to get up and running.

Note: This tar ball is next to impossible to set up properly. Fixing this probably won't happen any time soon.

we:search

we:search was the search engine developed for Gmane. It's no longer used -- Xapian is used instead.

Features:

  • Real-time indexing of new articles
  • Ranking by relevance or date
  • Search the entire spool or distinct groups
  • Author searches
  • Search result highlighting

Download

The Weaver Daemon

The web interface to the news spool is served by weaverd. It's a back-end daemon that generates thread and group views.

Features:

  • Threaded group output
  • Single thread displays
  • Fetching by Message-ID or group/article specs
  • Group name searches
  • Ability to handle hundreds of requests per second
  • Memory based, not disk based

Download

weft

weft is a command line based program that takes a mail or a news message and formats it into HTML.

Features:

  • Very fast -- typically 10ms per call.
  • Caches its output, so repeated calls to format the same article isn't necessary
  • Supports several personal decoration schemes (picons, X-Face, Face)
  • Handles MIME attachments
  • Multi-lingual -- normalizes everything to UTF-8
  • Handles complex MIME structures with embedded message/rfc822 parts
  • Strips non-safe HTML elements from text/html parts via an XML/XSLT process
  • Transforms text links into HTML links
  • Does text highlighting and smiley transformations

Download

Loom

Loom is a PHP/JavaScript-based news reader, and is basically a front end to weaverd and weft.

Features:

  • Uses cookies to remember what articles have been read
  • Easy keyboard-based navigation
  • Posting and followup
To download, see below.

twine

twine is a command line based program that converts mail into RSS. It's based on libxml2 and libgmime.

Features:

  • Fast.
  • Generates valid RSS.
  • Pretty good charset support.
  • Allows generating many variations (excerpted text, threads only, etc) in each call.

Download daily snapshot.

Gmane web pages

You can download all the web pages in a tar ball.