henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/07/87)
Early this morning a very preliminary release of C news was shipped off to the comp.sources.unix input queue. This release still has problems, and there will be a more definitive one later, but we decided to put out a preliminary release for the desperate and the curious. -- PS/2: Yesterday's hardware today. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology OS/2: Yesterday's software tomorrow. | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry
wcs@ho95e.UUCP (10/09/87)
In article <8720@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
:Early this morning a very preliminary release of C news was shipped off
:to the comp.sources.unix input queue. This release still has problems,
:and there will be a more definitive one later, but we decided to put out
:a preliminary release for the desperate and the curious.
Great! I've been alternating between desperate and curious, depending on my
poor 3B20's load average and general health. (Senility and disk rot have
both happened.) But two more patches for 2.11 have just appeared. Is
C news stable enough to install yet? What kind of problems should I
expect?
--
# Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/12/87)
> ...Is C news stable enough to install yet? What kind of problems should I > expect? There is more detail on this in the distribution, but roughly speaking, the alpha release is stable enough to install if you aren't doing anything strange with news and you are willing to spend some time understanding it, putting the pieces together, and checking them out. It's not a polished, turn-key distribution. Expect inadequate documentation (not everything that should be written has been), missing features (ditto), and probably some portability problems here and there (due to lack of formal beta testing). -- "Mir" means "peace", as in | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "the war is over; we've won". | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/13/87)
Some people have asked for a summary of what's good about C news. Well, basically it's smaller and much faster than B news. The real speed demon, rnews, receives and files articles at about 15 times the speed of its 2.11 counterpart. The code is a total rewrite, not a modification of B news, which means it is generally simpler and cleaner. (B news has been growing and mutating for about 6 years now and the result is a bit messy.) Here and there are a few bits of added functionality: expire uses a control file to tell it which newsgroups expire when, the batcher is much more flexible, and there is provision for separating newsgroup names from distribution names in the sys file (which makes life easier in certain tricky situations). -- "Mir" means "peace", as in | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "the war is over; we've won". | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/15/87)
I've received several inquiries about NNTP support in C news, so I suppose I should answer that one publicly... 1. There is no fundamental incompatibility. 2. I don't think Geoff was quite finished with putting the necessary hooks in, so the alpha release may not support it "right out of the box". 3. C news's speed advantage will be reduced due to NNTP's one-article-at-a- time processing; although batching was motivated by reducing phone transmission time, it also does wonders for processing speed if the software is prepared to exploit it, which C news is. Oh yes, also, people have asked about news readers. C news should be 100% compatible with existing news readers, and indeed we have neither the desire nor the energy to write our own. Rn is known to work with it and the others shouldn't have any serious problem. -- "Mir" means "peace", as in | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "the war is over; we've won". | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry