warner@hydrovax.nmt.edu (M. Warner Losh) (08/03/88)
I just installed the nntp program, with patches, that floated accross the net. The copy that made it to my sight had a few problems with tabs vs spaces, but this was a trival fix, and may have been part of the patches that I installed. Might I suggest that future postings use VMS-SHARE or VMS-SHAR? We're running 4.5, so our SMGDEF library module was hosed. I cranked up SDL (from the VWS distribution) and generated myself a SMGDEF module. I went ahead and inserted it into the FORSYSDEF library, and life was good. Now then, since I don't read news every time I log in, and I didn't want to add it to the DCLTABLES, I wrote the following DCL routine. Define it as NEWS :== @<where>NEWS.COM $ SET COMMAND MWL_EXE:NEWS $ DEFINE NEWSDIR <Where-News-Lives> $ NEWS :== NEWS/HEADER=(Subject,From,Date,Organization,lines) $ NEWS Be sure to replace the <Where-News-Lives> with where news lives on your system. Bugs, I have noticed: This program suffers from the line-eater problem. At least when used the NNTP server that is running on the local SUNS. You should not see the first "line eater" line in this posting. Lines that begin with a dot have that first dot eaten. There is no cancel command. There is no way to post news w/o having to crank up the whole program (Minor annoyance) Apparently no .signature file stuff. When articles arrive while you are reading news, you must exit the program before you can read these. This is a haslte, since it takes a while to start news up. There is no convient way to cycle back through the news groups you are subscribed, short of exiting news and restarting it. This goes hand in hand with the last bug. There are no KILL files. It isn't rn :-) Overall, I think it was definately worth the hastle I went through to get this program running. System configuration: Client: VMS 4.5, VWS 3.2, Wollongong rel 3.2. Server: SUNOS 3.5. Warner Losh My spelling is my own. Without a SPELL program, it is likely to be poorer than in the past....