ggr@pyuxbb.UUCP (Guy Riddle) (01/17/84)
Smoot-Carl-Mitchell gripes: > Personally I like the > way sendmail (the standard mail router from Berkeley) configures itself. > All filenames used by sendmail are put in a human readable configuration > file. The only filename the program needs to know is the name of the > configuration file and it can be set via an argument, if need be. If news > was written in this manner then you would only have to change the name of > the news spool directory in the configuration file to actually move the > news articles to a separate file system. Well, there *is* a feature in all the news programs called "pathinit" which will get the directory to use out of the /etc/passwd file, from the login directory of the user "netnews" (or whatever you might want to call it). It's all described in the directions. === Guy Riddle == AT&T Bell Laboratories, Piscataway ===
jsq@ut-sally.UUCP (John Quarterman) (01/18/84)
Smoot's out of town, so I'll answer this one:
Well, there *is* a feature in all the news programs called "pathinit"
which will get the directory to use out of the /etc/passwd file, from
the login directory of the user "netnews" (or whatever you might want
to call it). It's all described in the directions.
=== Guy Riddle == AT&T Bell Laboratories, Piscataway ===
The directions don't describe all the pathnames that are *still* hardwired
into the news software *despite* the valiant attempts that have evidently
been made to clean it up by Mark Horton or whoever: it almost does what
the directions say, but not quite, and that's not good enough, not when
you find the remaining cases the hard way when something just doesn't work.
Sendmail, on the other hand, *really is* dynamically configurable just
from one file (let's not get into the arcanity of the syntax, though).
--
John Quarterman, CS Dept., University of Texas, Austin, Texas
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