[news.sysadmin] building rn for A/UX 2.0

alexis@panix.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) (09/26/90)

I would like to get rn running properly under A/UX 2.0. I have had no trouble
building it, and in general everything works just fine, but two niggling
little problems remain.

rn does not like job control. In particular, when I resume a suspended rn:
>rn read error: Interrupted system call
>
>Caught an internal error--.newsrc restored

Now, this looked to my untrained eye (I'm a fairly experienced programmer,
but I've never coded C in Unix) like it was in a mode where it thought it
was a System V program, and didn't like BSD signals for job control. So I
tried compiling all of the modules with -D_BSD_SOURCE. I did this by altering
the CC options line in the Makefile. Well, they compiled with the right
switches but it still didn't like suspend signals.

So I tried other defines. In particular, I added the following to CFLAGS:
-D_SYSV_SOURCE -ZS
-D_BSD_SOURCE
-D_BSD_SOURCE -ZB

I tried one last thing: CFLAGS were -D_SYSV_SOURCE -ZS, and I put "-lposix"
before "-lcurses" in libs.

None of these had any effect. Then, on an off the cuff remark by Matthias
Urlichs, I looked around the rn code, and finally inserted a single line
early in the init.c file: "set42sig();". This time around rn had no trouble
dealing with suspend signals.

I have no problem with hacking on a little code now and then but I don't
understand _why_ rn is having this trouble- I though the whole point of
those defines was to make stuff like this automatic. What's more, when I
built rn under A/UX 1.1 I'm don't recall this being a problem.

The other problem is, I think, not actually an rn problem at all. When I
use Pnews to post an article, the "Path:" header is "panix!panix.uucp",
whereas rn's followup command correctly generates "panix!alexis". It is
my guess that Bnews (in particular, inews?) is generating that path
incorrectly, but when rn supplies the path, it's OK. Does anyone know
if this is correct?

The news version is 2.11.18 (or thereabouts) and rn is 4.3.2.4.

Thanks,
---
Alexis Rosen
cmcl2!panix!alexis