dave@uwmcsd1.UUCP (Dave Rasmussen) (05/14/87)
Has anyone hacked up vn or written a newsreader that uses nntp with
vn-like features?
A number of users in my dept find vn much more productive than the other
news readers, but can't justify copying all the news text to every machine
on our campus.
We'd like to hear from anyone who's done anything on the order of an nntp
vn. If not, I suppose it's time to look at writing a new newsreader.
--
Dave Rasmussen c/o Computing Services Division @ U of WI - Milwaukee
Internet: dave@csd1.milw.wisc.edu Uucp: uwvax!uwmcsd1!dave {o,o}
Csnet: dave%uwmcsd1@uwm Phone: +1 (414) 963-5133 \u/
ICBM: 43 4 58 N/ 87 55 52 W Usnail: 3200 N Cramer #E380, Milw WI 53211bobm@rtech.UUCP (Bob Mcqueer) (05/19/87)
> > Has anyone hacked up vn or written a newsreader that uses nntp with > vn-like features? > Something I intend for vn: I want to separate the parts which fetch article information and articles themselves, preserving the user interface. I would approach this by simply defining what routines have to be called which would be expected to build the current vn internal data structure, and what support routines they may call to assist them. The program should be reasonably modular now - it would mainly be a matter of cleaning up & generalizing the interfaces to the routines in "newsrc.c", introducing some kind of a file-fetching call to the read / save interactions, and providing an interface to call for followup posting. AND documenting same so somebody could reasonably be expected to implement a new version. Then, one could go about writing various "back-end" portions to allow vn to operate in several guises: 1) the current one, of course. 2) NNTP. I haven't looked at NNTP at this stage, so I really don't know anything about it. 3) I heard from eric@snark, involved with the TMNN news project, who was modifying vn to use its layered abstraction. I haven't heard anything more lately, and I don't know the status. 4) a version speeding up the initial reading phase by simply reading a single file containing the pertinent information for constructing pages. This file would be constructed by a daemon. 5) my pet project. I would like to put net configuration / article / user information on a DBMS such as INGRES (company plug?), allowing you to bring all that firepower to bear in specifying what articles you want to see in a reader, and providing good support for doing all sorts of other net-related stuff. For instance, you could see all articles posted within some time interval which passed through some specific machine en-route, or all articles in net.sources with > 100 lines, or whatever you please. Once again, daemons run around periodically and update the database. I've had an intended database schema lying around for some time now, and I've done an extraction tool for getting all the system information out of the mod.map file # lines. The tool also error checks the file formats, sort of providing "lint" functionality for map files. It also accepts a very broad range of formats for things like the #W and #L lines. You can easily attach your own routines to do whatever you like with the extracted data. I can post the thing if anyone's interested. 6) At this site, we have a lot of VMS systems as well as UNIX boxes. The sys. admin. folks here would like to run a reader from VMS. Then, we might be able to put up local newsgroups and phase out a bunch of local mailing lists (a lot of people have only VMS accounts). If we can get a server going, I've been asked a couple of times about porting vn over to VMS. Now, the bad part. I'm really in a crunch at the moment, and probably will be for a few weeks yet. I would like to see a version of vn which could talk to an various news servers happen, but I can't make any promises. -- Bob McQueer {amdahl, sun, mtxinu, hoptoad, cpsc6a}!rtech!bobm