allbery@uunet.UU.NET (Brandon S. Allbery - comp.sources.misc) (11/05/89)
Posting-number: Volume 9, Administrivia 1 Submitted-by: allbery@uunet.UU.NET (Brandon S. Allbery) Archive-name: v9-welcome [The only change is that I corrected some typoes and cleaned up the part on which newsgroup to post to. If you've read this before, it contains nothing new. ++bsa] This is the first of three messages comprising the periodic Welcome! posting for comp.sources.misc. Hopefully, any questions you have will be answered here; if they are not, send mail to me (comp-sources-misc-request@<backbone>), the moderator. > Introduction < Comp.sources.misc is sort of a "catch-all" sources group. The intent is that small sources, non-Un*x sources for which no newsgroup exists, and sources which the moderators of comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.games will not accept can be sent here. This does not mean that large Un*x sources will not be accepted, but they will probably gain a wider distribution if they are sent to comp.sources.unix. They also slow down the flow of sources through this newsgroup to some extent. As a result, the group will be run in an informal fashion. In general, *any* program source code will be accepted, but discussion and "sources wanted" requests will be discarded with a message back to the sender advising him/her to post to the correct newsgroup. Please do not send either to me, they don't belong here.) This newsgroup isn't intended to be a high-volume one, since the "big" stuff should be sent elsewhere. Of course, if I'm sent a 50-part submission like jetroff, the volume goes up a bit.... However, it is to be hoped that people still have the desire to post their favorite prompt generators, integer square root algorithms, etc. > Why moderated? < The moderated comp.sources.misc replaced the unmoderated net.sources in May 1987. This was done by the Usenet backbone in response to the observed fact that net.sources was largely NON-sources by number of articles. Mail I have received indicates that the majority of people are willing to trade the small delays (mainly caused by network delays in mail) for having a source group that isn't full of noise. As stated above, the only reason a submission will be rejected is if it is a non-source. I, as the moderator, am striving to get things out as quickly as possible while not posting non-sources; testing is not done. If it's something that's worth testing, it probably belongs in comp.sources.unix instead. (Send submissions to comp-sources-unix@<backbone> in that case.) Testing may be done in the future, but shuffling sources between machines to test it can be difficult and trying, and in any case if it wants e.g. a Sun console there's not a whole lot I can do about it. > Why comp.sources.misc? < There are three choices for sources newsgroups, not counting local sources groups (fl.sources) or groups for specific systems (comp.sys.sun, et al.). Choosing between them can be somewhat difficult for the novice, and even for seasoned sources posters with unusual submissions. Here, then, is a discussion of the various "primary" sources groups, their advantages and disadvantages, and a crude attempt at quantifying when to use them. First off is comp.sources.unix, the major sources group. It is rather unfortunately named, but don't let that stop you from trying to submit something if it fits the group's guidelines otherwise. The benefits you'll get are testing of source on at least some machines before posting and guaranteed archiving at many Internet and UUCP sites. The problem is that smaller postings aren't usually accepted, especially if they don't come with a Makefile and README file -- and sometimes the moderator declares a moratorium on certain types of postings, like text editors. Trying doesn't hurt, however; if the moderator rejects something, he dumps it into the c.s.misc mailbox. I should also note that the current policy of comp.sources.unix is not to accept "shareware" programs, programs which request or require a fee to the author for continued use. For small sources and beta copies of programs (which probably should not be archived, in favor of the production release), one might choose alt.sources. It has one major advantage over the other possibilities: there is no moderation, meaning no delays and no rules for formatting. You're free to just pipe a source file to inews if the fit takes you (not that I recommend it). But it also has one major disadvantage: since the group isn't moderated, there is nothing preventing people from starting up discussions ranging from source code topics to why EUnet works the way it does. This, if you'll recall, is what caused comp.sources.misc to be created in the first place; although it seems that at least some people have benefitted from the lesson and have started to work harder to prevent its happening to alt.sources. Another disadvantage is that, being an "alt" group, it doesn't get as wide a distribution as the "mainstream" Usenet. (For further information on the "alt" hierarchy, see the "Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies" document posted once a month by Gene Spafford in news.lists.) And then there's this group, comp.sources.misc. The original charter called for moderation solely to reject non-source postings, nothing more; the intent was to provide net.sources without the noise. This changed rather quickly, as I adopted a policy of letting the group be controlled more by its users (submitters, readers, archivers) than by "moderative fiat", to coin a phrase. The policy worked quite well, but caused the newsgroup to drift closer to the style of a regular moderated sources group. The advantages of posting here are that archiving is almost as widespread as that of comp.sources.unix, that anything that is source code can be posted, and that it's guaranteed not to be lost in "where are our Soviet friends?" postings; the disadvantages are that there is a delay caused by having to filter stuff through me, the moderator, and that submissions that aren't in the de-facto "standard" format will get held up while I make them so. So which do you choose? While there are no hard rules, there does seem to be an evolving rationale for the use of the groups: tiny programs and beta-test copies of larger programs are often sent to alt.sources, small "released" programs or beta-test copies of major programs often go to comp.sources.misc, and released major programs usually go to comp.sources.unix. There are, of course, other alternatives. Games usually are sent to comp.sources.games regardless of their size, and programs which are specific to a particular computer might be better off in a specialized sources group like comp.sources.sun. However, it's up to the submitter to decide to which newsgroup a submission should be sent. > Guidelines for fast processing of submissions < The readers of this newsgroup would prefer that posters follow certain guidelines. Not following these guidelines may result in long delays, since some things *must* be fixed for news to accept the submission, and others fixed so that I can spend time processing submissions rather than responding to flames. ;-) First, uuencoded postings are frowned upon. If at all possible, binary data files should be translated to an ASCII format that is usable by others. If it's not possible, consider sending the machine-dependent parts of the posting to another newsgroup. If all else fails, it will be accepted if it is not the only component of the submission; otherwise, it may be better to announce the availability of the item via anonymous FTP, UUCP, FTAM, etc A corollary of the above rule is that uuencoded (ABEd, btoa'd, BinHexed, ...) compressed (packed, ...) archives are not acceptable regardless of the compression and/or archiving method used. Not everyone has ARC, PKZIP, ZOO, StuffIt, or even cpio or tar and the "compress" program. The second rule is that "shell archives" as created by "shar", "cshar", "bundle", etc. be used to package files. Preferably, use cshar: it guards against mangling by older news programs, Bitnet mailers, etc. I must repack non-shar'ed submissions so that they have a better chance of surviving older mail/news systems and inter-network gateways. Third, a Subject: header should *always* be included in a submission. Certain large postings in the past have arrived sans Subject:; not only does this force me to make one up for the archive list, but (more importantly) inews, the driving program for the Usenet news system, will not accept articles which lack a subject line. (Yes, I know about C news. Do *you* know about RFC1050?) Fourth: The proper submission address for ANY moderated newsgroup is of the form: newsgroup-name@backbone-site The newsgroup name uses hyphens as separators, not periods (sendmail does not appreciate the periods); "comp-sources-misc" is an example. Backbone sites are the major news feeds (excepting att.att.com, which does not pass mail) which serve large areas. (No, ncoast isn't one. (Yet.) UUNET is.) Be warned that some backbone sites may use "sources-misc" instead of "comp-sources-misc"; there was some confusion about it at the inception of comp.sources.misc. Newsgroup-related mail that is *not* a submission should be sent to the same address as above, with "-request" added to the newsgroup name; for example, "comp-sources-misc-request@uunet.uu.net". Please do not send them to the submission address. Please do NOT send sources to *any* of my regular mailboxes. This will cause possibly long delays while I reroute the mail to the proper address (which may well be on another machine) -- and since I use MH on most machines and UUNET doesn't have MH, I have to do extra work to unpack the forwards on UUNET. Note that since ncoast's free disk space is never large, it is possible for large submissions sent to my mailbox on ncoast to be lost along with any other submissions or ordinary news and mail traffic. (This is changing, yes... for now. However, every system administrator knows that users expand to fill all available disk space; the present situation on ncoast is temporary.) In particular, please do not address submissions to ncoast!allbery or *any* address on ncoast (NCoast.ORG): comp.sources.misc no longer lives on ncoast, so your submissions will have to be forwarded -- and the sources-misc aliases have been removed from ncoast's mailer, so anything sent to those addresses will be bounced by ncoast's mailer. It's only been 8 months since the group moved to UUNET; by now, I would hope that everyone knows about it. Also, sending to allbery@uunet.uu.net looks good now, but it could change overnight if I become unable to moderate comp.sources.misc for some reason. Use the proper aliases on the backbone machines. Please do not package executable programs and sources in the same submission. Executable binary programs are inherently system-dependent, and therefore should be posted to a system-specific "binaries" group. And, as a special case, Un*x executables should NEVER be posted to the Usenet. > Special services < Now, after all the "thou shalt/thou shalt not"'s, here's some optional services to compensate for some of the restrictions outlined above. One way to solve the problem of an announcement not going out the same day as the posting it announces is to send the announcement to me -- under separate cover, please, it slows things down if I have to break a submission apart to get at the file -- with instructions as to where it should be posted, and I will insure that both go out the same day, if possible. (If one of the other newsgroups is also moderated, there's not a whole lot I can do about it.) The same goes for binaries and/or other material associated with a source; send it under separate cover and tell me what to do with it, and I will try to arrange for them to all go out at the same time. To help avoid the longer delays and possible network difficulties between the main comp.sources.misc receiving address and sites in Australia, john@basser.cs.su.oz.au acts as a sub-moderator for our friends "down under". It's not required to send sources to him, but the submission will be seen by your neighbors that much more quickly if it doesn't have to cross the ocean twice. It also saves on the bills incurred by all that trans-oceanic data transfer, which might not matter to you but *does* matter to your site admin and to the Australian gateway maintainers. > Patches to sources < There are now de-facto guidelines for the handling of "patches" (fixes) to source postings in moderated newsgroups. Unfortunately, I'm still working on implementing them; at the moment, I'm a bit tied up with moving "ncoast" to a new machine. I hope to have them working soon. Patches to source programs should be posted to comp.bugs.misc (no, the group is *not* directly related to comp.sources.misc!); official patches should be sent out only by the author of the original program (unless special arrangements are made with the author) and should also be sent to comp.sources.misc. They should be posted as "context diffs", if at all possible; Berkeley-based systems have the "-c" option to the "diff" command to do this, and for AT&T-based systems there are commands available to translate "diff" output to context diffs. Check the Indexes to comp.sources.misc and comp.sources.unix. The use of context diffs allows patches to be applied to sources which have had local modifications to aid porting, etc. Official patches will be posted as "archname/patchNN" for multi-part submissions and as "archname.pNN" for single-part submissions. This is a temporary arrangement only; in the future, single-part submissions will be posted as "archname/submission" and patches will be posted in the same way as for multi-part submissions. At present, there is no special header line for patches, but a Patch-to: header will be implemented in the near future to aid in locating the submission to which a given patch applies. Patches are applied with the "patch" program. It is also possible to apply patches by hand, if the "patch" program is not available; it's adviseable to look for "patch2" in the comp.sources.unix archives, however. In the future, I will be adding automatic version tracking to the archive mechanism as well. > Archiving < UUNET is now (at least, for the moment) an archive site, so the contents of this newsgroup all the way back to July 1987 are available. (Nothing earlier was archived or was even assigned archiving information.) I add archive headers to posted submissions, suitable for manual or automatic archiving and archive retrieval. The archive Index is posted each month as part of the Welcome! posting; it should follow this posting. The format of the archive header is: Posting-number: Volume 2, Issue 45 Submitted-by: "user-full-name" <address> Archive-name: name For administrative postings, the Posting-number: header looks like Comp.sources.misc: Volume 2, Administrivia 2 for administrivia. These headers are often referred to as an "auxiliary" header, since it is considered to be part of the message body by the news-posting software. Each posting has an Archive-Name, which is a single word of (generally) 6-8 letters which tries to be somewhat descriptive. You may want to use this instead of the volume/issue number. However, the local article number should *not* be used; it is dependent on the order in which articles are received and when your local system began receiving them, and is guaranteed not to match the numbers on uunet, ncoast, or many other systems. Prior to January 1, 1988, a different archive header system was used. At the time, it was not expected that comp.sources.misc would be welded into the then-evolving standard for sources archiving. (Read: I was still trying to cling to the last remnants of the group's original charter....) There was only one special header line, and it resided in the main header. It looked like X-Archive: yymm/nn where "yymm" was the year and month of the submission date and "nn" was a sequence number. This must be used to retrieve submissions from 1987, although work is being done to add standard archive headers to these articles. Submissions prior to July, 1987 have no archiving information at all. At th time, the group's original charter was in full force, and archiving was not considered to be important. These articles will also be assigned archive headers in the future, but for now the only way to retrieve these postings is to search each individual file. A list of archive sites is included in the second part of this posting. It should be noted that this newsgroup is *not* gatewayed to WSMR-SIMTEL20; if it is for some reason important to have a submission archived there, use comp.sources.unix or a specialized sources group. > Okay, so how do I get at archived submissions? < It varies. Moreover, it is likely to be changing in many cases, as larger UUCP sites gain direct Internet access and the Internet itself moves (slowly) to OSI (GOSIP) compliance; and arrangements outside the U.S. are pretty much outside my control and knowledge. > Using "ftp" < If an archive site provides "anonymous FTP" access, sites directly on the Internet (that is, sites possessing an IP address, which looks like four small numbers separated with periods) can use the "ftp" program to get at sources. Sites which aren't on the Internet (more properly, the NSFnet) can not use ftp to retrieve this information. And no, having the ftp program does not mean that you can access NSFnet: there are many systems which use TCP/IP over local networks only, and at least one brand of system which has a program called "ftp" that has nothing to do with the Internet at all. You should check with a local system administrator to find out the details of using ftp. On most systems and to most archive sites, the following will work: type the command "ftp system.domain" (example: "ftp uunet.uu.net" -- case does not matter), enter "anonymous" when it asks for a user name, and enter *your* Internet address for the password. If "ftp" says that the system doesn't exist, check your spelling -- if the system name is spelled correctly, look for an IP address for the archive site and badger your system adminsitrator to install a version of ftp which knows about nameservers. You should also be warned that some systems (like uunet) will not accept FTP connections from sites not registered with a nameserver. Once you are logged in to the archive system, you will get a prompt that looks like "ftp>". (It may not be identical, since it is possible to change the ftp prompt with a command in many versions of ftp.) At this point, you can use "cd" to change directories, "ls" or "dir" to list files, and "get" to retrieve them. For sources archives, it is not necessary to worry about file types unless the files are compressed; in that case, you must use the "binary" command for Unix or VMS hosts and "tenex" on Tenex (TOPS-10, TENEX, TOPS-20/ TWENEX) hosts. *** Not switching the file type can result in a garbled file, especially on Tenex hosts, which do not store binary data the same way as Unix hosts. *** To disconnect from the archive site, enter the "bye" command. > Using UUCP < UUCP archives aren't quite as standardized as FTP archives; check the archive list for the user name and password to use, and ask your system administrator to arrange to be able to poll the archive site. (If s/he refuses, you are stuck.) The "uucp" command is used to request files from a UUCP archive. Unlike FTP, UUCP does not (usually) do the transfer immediately; this is because most UUCP sites must be called over phone lines, so long-distance calls will usually be made in the early morning hours. Since you can't look around in the archives, you must know the pathname of the article to be retrieved. Most archives have an index file available via FTP; check the archive list in the next posting. It's a good idea to retrieve this file before getting anything from the archive, since things can move around without warning. The command to retrieve a submission looks like uucp -r archivesite!path/to/file "archivesite" is the name of the archive site, and "path/to/file" is the pathname listed in the archive index for that site. Please be warned that for security reasons, it is not usually possible to specify wildcards (?, *, [], or ~name) in the pathname. Also, while more recent versions of uucp allow a uucp command to travrse multiple systems (uucp -r systemA!systemB!file), for security reasons this is usually disabled. In both cases you won't find out until after the archive site has been called. > Mail archives < Some archive sites have mail servers that will accept mail from you and mail back files from the archive. There are no standards here; however, it's usually safe to mail a message containing the single word "help" to the mail server. Check the archive list for more information. > Other archives < I know that there are equivalent commands for OSI-compatible networks (FTAM), CSNet and Bitnet; I do not know how to use them. Check with your system adminsitrator first for local commands, then send mail to the archive maintainer on the archive site. > Now that I have an article, how do I use it? < If it came from an archive site, it may be compressed; if it was sent by a mail server, it may also be uuencoded. Compressed files have an extension of ".Z". Uuencoded files can be recognized by a line saying "begin 666 filename", followed by lines of what looks like random gobbledygook. (If a mail server splits a file into multiple parts, you may just have the gobbledygook. In this case, the server will include a message saying which part of the file it is, and will tell you how to combine them.) To extract a uuencoded file, give the command "uudecode filename". This will create a (binary, usually compressed) file in the current directory. To extract a compressed file, give the command "uncompress filename". The ".Z" extension will be removed from the file. The original, compressed file will be removed as part of this operation. After doing this, you should be left with a news article exactly as it is stored in the news spool directories. This file will contain a news header, a description (usually), and a "shell archive" ("shar"). Move to an empty directory (important!) and unpack the archive. Some systems have a command "unshar" to unpack these files; if yours does, use it. Otherwise, you can use an editor to remove the header, then just say "sh filename". I use a small (one line) shell script: sed '1,/^[#:]/d' $1 | sh which will handle anything (I hope!) in the comp.sources.misc archives. I do attempt to confirm that a shell archive contains nothing dangerous, but if you unpack as root and the archive removes your /etc directory or something equally unpleasant, I don't want to hear about it. Unpack shell archives as an unprivileged user. Once you've unpacked the archive, you're on your own. Keep the header from the submission handy, in case you can't figure out what's going on; the address in the "Submitted-by:" line can be used to contact the author of the program. > Closing words < Following this message should be a "shar" file containing the archive list and an index for each volume of the archives. More information on archives is included within the posting, with specifics and contacts for known archive sites. If your site archives comp.sources.misc, please let me know -- it's always nice to know who's keeping it, and I don't know of many archive sites outside the U.S. as yet. You now know enough (I hope) to be able to get some use out of this newsgroup. If you have any questions or suggestions, send them to the request address mentioned earlier in this article; I also participate in discussions about moderated sources newsgroups in comp.sources.d. Have fun and happy hacking! ++Brandon, your friendly neighborhood comp.sources.misc moderator.