trn4 doesn't really need to depend on inn2-inews | inews

The description reads:
"trn is a threaded news reader with a long history, descended from Larry Wall's rn (part of the second generation of newsreaders). It has a powerful full screen text mode user interface, where most actions are available at the press of a single key. It is highly configurable.

This version of trn reads news from a news server via NNTP (the Network News Transfer Protocol). You must have a news server available - large sites usually provide a site-wide server.

If you install a news server on your system (either containing just
local newsgroups or with a partial or full USENET feed) you can
configure trn to access it."

This implies one can install this program and access any NNTP server (such as one provided by one's ISP.

However, this package depends on inn2-news or inews. That dependancy contradicts the program's description does it not?

I'd like to install trn4, but don't want my own news server. t4n4 is simply a newsreader like tin, rn pine, pan, mozilla-thunderbird, knode and so on is it not?

It's true, you don't have to have an inews installed if you're only going to read news or post news to a remote server over NNTP. This is probably a dependency bug as you observe.

That said, you can install (e.g.) inn2-inews without having to have a local news server installed, so it's not too big a deal.

Like to see this fixed. Shouldn't be that difficult.

This bug was fixed in the package trn4 - 4.0-test77-9

---------------
trn4 (4.0-test77-9) unstable; urgency=low

  * Support parallel builds.
  * Switch to git; add Vcs-* fields.
  * The built-in inews is sufficient for remote posting over NNTP, so
    depending on a separate inews package is too strong. However, it still
    needs a separate inews for local posting. Drop the inews dependency to
    Recommends and add a note to the package description (closes: #265443,
    LP: #3804).
  * Policy version 3.9.5:
    - Move Conflicts: trn (<= 3.6-14) to Breaks.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Sun, 26 Jan 2014 22:01:54 +0000