WebNews ToDo List

Here are some possible future improvements to WebNews.

• Add threading.
• Modularize. It should be easy to break WebNews up into two or three modules, and have the .cgi just instantiate and call them.
• Make it easy to install from CPAN. Ideally, something like perl -MWebNews -e install should suffice to install a working WebNews distribution, once you have installed the modules. Also need to pay attention to making it easy to upgrade.
• Let some kind of database backend be an option -- either via DBI, or via AnyDBM_File. These would help speed up the program by limiting the need to use the filesystem and locks.
• Let users be able to add their own headers.
• Keep per-user preferences: name, address, etc. (Only per-user preferences kept now are newsrc files, but it should not be too hard to generalize.) Keep this in mind when designing database schemata.
• Package documentation up with each release, so that users don't necessarily have to refer to the Web version exclusively.
• Profile webnews.cgi and see what are some more hotspots in the code that could be optimized.
• If there is a good way to deal with compilation overhead, we should use it: probably this means going to the zillions of tiny perl scripts model like Bugzilla did. It is worth benchmarking WebNews in mod_perl vs. perlcc vs. regular CGI, though, because breaking up webnews.cgi would amount to a major rewrite.

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Maintained by Brian R. Gaeke