[news.sysadmin] pcrrn revisited

andy@savoy.Berkeley.EDU (Andy Lieberman) (10/26/89)

I am tring to get pcrrn running on my PC (typical '386 DOS4 machine) and
am having some problems that I wasn't expecting.  I would like to hear from
anyone who has gotten pcrrn and made it work and find out where you got the
code and what you had to do to get it running (in general).  I'm also
wondering who is responsible for maintaining pcrrn and how I can contact
him/her via e-mail.

Background:
I found pcrrn on ucbvax.  I ftped it and found that there was source code, but
no README file or other documentation.  I posted asking if anyone knew anything
about pcrrn and got no responses :(   (at that point I was specifically worried 
about differences between the Exclan and Ungerman Bass TCP libraries, which 
turned out to be minor).

So, I hacked around on the make files and
configuration files and changed clientli.c so that it would work with my
Ungerman Bass Ethernet board.  This was all expected and fairly straightforward.
After compiling, I manually created my own .newsrc.  I can now use most of the
reading features fairly well, but there are still a number of major problems.

Problems:
I made some other hacks to clean up problems I was having, but am wondering why
I had to, since everyone must face these same problems.  For example,
-- I had to change the puts() commands in term.h() to fputs() so that the 
articles display correctly.
-- I have to use ctrl-J instead of the return key when entering commands.
-- I had to write my own makedir.
-- Lines longer than 80 characters are truncated.
-- The save commands don't seem to work.
-- There doesn't seem to be any sign of Pnews or newsgrps...

Somebody please clue me in.
Thanks in advance,
Andy Lieberman

p.s.  e-mail responses and (assuming I get some) I will post a summary to
news.software.nntp