[comp.bugs.misc] bug in NNTP/inews makefile

woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (03/18/88)

Problem:
   In remaking NNTP client stuff to access a different server, the posting
software wrongly continues to access the old server.

Repeat-By:
  Edit common/conf.h and rrn/config.h to change NNTP server hosts on an
NNTP client machine. Remake everything, and see that reading works fine
off the new server but posting is still trying to access the old server.

Fix:
  In inews/makefile, there should be a dependency line showing that inews.o
depends on ../common/conf.h, because inews.c contains a reference to the
macro SERVER_HOST which is defined there. Thus when we changed the server
host, inews.c was never recompiled and it needed to be.

--Greg

karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (03/18/88)

Greg, the bug you report is not a problem in later releases of NNTP.
1.4 and 1.5 both have a macro SERVER_FILE, which is a string constant,
the name of a file wherein the name of the host intended to be the
server is held.  There are comments to the effect that this alleviates
the need for compiled-in server names.  SERVER_HOST is no more.

We've been using 1.5 for about 2 weeks.  It seems very stable and
reliable.