dce@mips.UUCP (03/25/87)
A few months ago, I sent Rick a change to the HIDDENNET code that
changed HIDDENNET from a site name to the name of a file containing
the site name. Rick didn't get the message, and I haven't had
time to "unchange" my sources to get the patch to him.
Anyway, these new defines, GENERICPATH and GENERICFROM, and yet another
source of pain for me.
You see, I support a product that does not come with sources by
default (this isn't unique; the Tektronix 6XXX UTek system sources
aren't available, and I suspect that there are other systems that
never come with sources), and it is possible that:
1. a customer may not be able to afford sources
2. a customer may not have enough disk space to keep a source
release online
3. a customer may not want to mess with news sources
(NOTE: This doesn't imply that if a customer wants a copy of the
news 2.11 distribution that we wouldn't make an effort to help
them get it. We aren't trying to make a profit off of anything a
customer should be able to get for free, but we can't spend our
time and money putting sources for everything that comes across the
net into our products.)
So, part of my job is to supply binary copies of useful software. This
includes having the software be configurable without sources. (By
"configurable", I mean that site-specific stuff should be settable
by the system administrator. I don't mean that it has to allow every
possible ifdef to be dynamically defined. For example, all of our
systems come with sendmail, so people can't expect the binary distribution
version of MH to be configurable to use mmdf at this time.)
What I would like to suggest is that the values of GENERICPATH, GENERICFROM,
MYDOMAIN, and any other site-specific data be read from a file
somewhere. A simple "value:name" format would do:
GENERICPATH: mips
GENERICFROM: mips.UUCP
MYDOMAIN: .UUCP
(This could also be adopted by rn's Pnews command, which seems to like
to generate 'Reply-To:' lines with my real hostname in them.)
Another effect of this would be to allow sites within the same LAN
to share a set of binaries while still having the ability to configure
some things differently.
--
David Elliott
UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!dce, DDD: 408-720-1700