jal@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu (05/03/88)
I got a version of uucp for the PC working recently and am now interested in getting a newsfeed. Has anyone converted a news reading program (such a rn, vnews, etc) over to the PC or will I have to work on it myself? Thanks for the information. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I program ... therefore I am. John Lefor University of Rochester Dept of E. Engineering 716-275-8265 jal@ee.rochester.edu ...!rochester!ur-valhalla!jal
rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd) (05/05/88)
In article <1280@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> jal@galaxy.ee.rochester.edu (John Lefor) writes: >I got a version of uucp for the PC working recently and >am now interested in getting a newsfeed. Has anyone converted >a news reading program (such a rn, vnews, etc) over to the >PC or will I have to work on it myself? Just for the record, a news-reading program by itself won't do much good; you also need to port the 'rnews' program (or some equivalent) that reads in the compressed news batches and inserts the separate articles into the spool directory. You also need an 'expire' program to get rid of old news, unless your disk is a lot larger than mine :-). There's a lot of stuff to get right. Hmm..I remember some time back that a "new site" map entry appeared from someone claiming to be running B News 2.11 under MS-DOS. Don't know anything more about it. Also, there's a news-handling program part of the UFGATE Fido-Usenet gateway package. I believe one of the authors, Tim Pozar, is on the net (pozar@hoptoad). I don't use the package myself, but I know people who do. I don't know whether there is an independent news-reader as part of the package or whether you have to read the news after it's been converted to Fido format. Fido message- reading software is appallingly primitive in its interface to those used to rn; also somewhere in the Fido software is an undocumented #-of-lines limit that may bite you on long messages (esp. source postings). If you're considering porting News to the PC, it'll take a lot of work. I know, I started on a port of C News to MS-DOS before giving up and going on to other things. The netnews software is written for a Unix environment and heavily uses some features (links, pipes, fork) that require a good deal of effort to work around. You'll also find that, as on any large software project on the PC, that a large portion of your time will be spent tracking down bugs caused by broken compilers. Maybe someday we'll have a real C compiler for the PC, but I'm not holding my breath. -- Richard Todd Dubious Domain: rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu USSnail:820 Annie Court,Norman OK 73069 Fido:1:147/1 UUCP: {many AT&T sites}!occrsh!uokmax!rmtodd "MSDOS is a Neanderthal operating system" - Henry Spencer
root@nccnat.UUCP (Paul Shields) (05/07/88)
>In article <1280@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> jal@galaxy.ee.rochester.edu (John Lefor) writes: >>I got a version of uucp for the PC working recently and >>am now interested in getting a newsfeed. Has anyone converted >>a news reading program (such a rn, vnews, etc) over to the >>PC or will I have to work on it myself? Yes. I have. It does rnews, expire, batching and unbatching. The user interface is readnews. [...] >Hmm..I remember some time back that a "new site" map entry appeared from >someone claiming to be running B News 2.11 under MS-DOS. Don't know >anything more about it. That's me. It uses the UULINK package by Lauren Weinstein. I'll have it ready for beta testing real soon now. Total size is about 250K worth of context-diff's from Patch level 8 of Netnews. The remaining work is in fixing some memory limitations on the PC, massaging rnews and recmail, and documenting the patches. [...] > If you're considering porting News to the PC, it'll take a lot of work. >I know, I started on a port of C News to MS-DOS before giving up and >going on to other things. The netnews software is written for a Unix >environment and heavily uses some features (links, pipes, fork) that >require a good deal of effort to work around. The patches for the most part serialise the forks and simulate pipes and links. The hardest one here was rnews, which in its current state has been cracked and twisted to make it work. > You'll also find that, as >on any large software project on the PC, that a large portion of your >time will be spent tracking down bugs caused by broken compilers. Maybe >someday we'll have a real C compiler for the PC, but I'm not holding >my breath. I agree. I use two compilers, Lattice 3.20, and Microsoft 5.0. There are problems with both. Lattice doesn't have complete Unix enough libraries, and I can't get MSC to open more than 16 files at once (req'd for expire.) -- Paul Shields, shields@yunccn.UUCP If you think you have a subconscious, or yunccn!nccnat!root you have a software integration problem.
bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (05/08/88)
In article <1259@uokmax.UUCP> rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd) writes: >In article <1280@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> jal@galaxy.ee.rochester.edu (John Lefor) writes: >>I got a version of uucp for the PC working recently and >>am now interested in getting a newsfeed. Has anyone converted >>a news reading program (such a rn, vnews, etc) over to the >>PC or will I have to work on it myself? >Just for the record, a news-reading program by itself won't do much good; >you also need to port the 'rnews' program (or some equivalent) that reads >in the compressed news batches and inserts the separate articles into [ ... ] It's easier than that if you can get your feeding site to go along with it. There are two alternatives, each illustrated below. If the site is running uulink (from Vortex Technology) the first technique will work. Note that it does not batch to allow reading on an article basis as opposed to a batch basis. The second simply mails the articles to each reader. The sys file for each site determines what groups they get and the script below actually ships the stuff out from time to time. Note that each batch is sorted by newsgroup first so that they are at least batched by group. # # Send news to neighbors daily at 0600 # if test -s /usr/spool/batch/uulinksite then sort /usr/spool/batch/uulinksite > /tmp/uulinksite cp /tmp/techsoar /usr/spool/batch/uulinksite cat /usr/spool/batch/uulinksite | while read art do uux - -r -n -gd uulinksite!rnews < $art done rm -f /usr/spool/batch/uulinksite /tmp/uulinksite fi # # Mail news to neighbors daily at 0600 # if test -s /usr/spool/batch/mailsite then sort /usr/spool/batch/mailsite > /tmp/mailsite cp /tmp/mailsite /usr/spool/batch/mailsite cat /usr/spool/batch/mailsite | while read art do mail mailsite!user1 mailsite!user2 < $art done rm -f /usr/spool/batch/mailsite /tmp/mailsite fi I suspect that the news administrator feeding you would be more receptive to this technique if you sent it along with the request for a feed. I never said it was elegant, just offered it as an alternative. -- Bill Kennedy usenet {rutgers,ihnp4!killer,cbosgd}!ssbn!bill internet bill@ssbn.WLK.COM