peterd@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) (09/11/90)
In article <49392@brunix.UUCP>, agm@cs.brown.edu (Axel Merk) writes: > help! I NEED LISP!!! [ And several other people wanted a Lisp ] This posting is a follow-up to all those poor souls who wrote about not having a Lisp for their machine after the "big announcement" and how they would immediately sell their NeXT and go ice fishing if they are not given one. Well, I'm still steaming about the reaction to an earlier posting, so let me make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR. I DON'T REMEMBER IF THIS RUMOUR IS EVEN TRUE OR NOT! NeXT MAY WELL BE PLANNING TO GIVE EVERY LISP USER A FREE CUBE! I DON'T KNOW NOR DO I CARE!!! Fine, with that out of the way, I am writing this to tell you about: a) a (possibly useful) new tool for net users. b) A nice version of Lisp, and where to get it. First, the nifty new tool for net users. For some time we have been faced with a problem many of you will be familar with. We knew there is a lot of good free software out there, but couldn't always find what we wanted. We started to build up a list of archive sites, but logging in around the net looking for things didn't seem to be a productive way to spend our time. The problem was not having or finding working archive servers, it was keeping a current list of what was on them. Thus was born "archie", an Internet archive server server (or a server^2 :-) Credit for this idea is sharedby me, Alan Emtage (bajan@cs.mcgill.ca), who set up the ftp search software, and Bill Heelan (wheelan@cs.mcgill.ca) who wrote the interface program currently in use. Alan has a set of shell scripts that automagically calls up some subset of our list of servers each night (to keep load down on any one machine) and do a remote 'ls' on that machine. We cycle through the entire list in about a month, so no entry can be more than that old. For what it's worth, we currently know of about 210 sites. This was originally used only by my staff, grep'ing through the listings for strings. We currently store everything in a series of files (eew!), one per host. We then NFS'ed the appropriate directory to our student machines and made it available to them. Finally, after a number of requests from people on the net who had gotten wind of this, we have prepared a "pre-beta" version of archie. Archie allows anyone to rlogin into one of our machines and query our archive lists. Another one of my guys, (Bill Heelan, wheelan@cs.mcgill.ca) wrote a bare-bones front end, which allows people to login, get a help message, ask for a specific string (using ed-like regular expressions) or get the contents of a specific archive server. Currently, archie is pretty brain-damaged. The files are stored as flat ASCII files and the "prog" command just launches a "grep" with the appropriate arguments. Future plans (once we get the latest start of semester out of the way) is to add a real database (we've compiled postgres (sp?) and Alan has started to code the program to parse the raw input). This will dramatically increase performance (the current system greps through about 31 Meg of listings!!). We are also looking at a number of other enhancements, including a mail-based interface so UUCP sites can write to us with their queries. Still, the basic functionality is there now. So, if you are looking for some public domain software, be it kcl or DES encryption, you are welcome to give archie a try. The current version runs on a Sun 4/280, which will see a lot of use this semester, so we might have to put certain restrictions on it later. For now, we are soliciting input, both on the original idea and our brain-damaged implementation. Oh, yeah. How to reach us. If you have Internet access, try an "rlogin quiche.cs.mcgill.ca -l listd" (I hope to get this transfered to "archie" instead of "listd" any day, but the old name will live for compatibility for a while). You should get a message with instructions and then the prompt. You can then ask for a specific site, or run the grep (command is "prog <pattern>"). Please don't go overboard. If you want our list of archive sites, or a copy of the software that lets us do this, don't run a 'prog *", write to either Alan, or Bill. We will probably take a while to answer, so bear with us. Meanwhile, your feedback on the idea is welcome. BTW, strictly speaking this probably is not a NeXT issue, as we are not currently running it on a NeXT (that could change soon, more details later). Meanwhile, it might help calm those of you about to sell your NeXT machines. There's a lot of free software out there. I hope this helps you find some of it. ------------------------------------------------------------ Now, the public domain version of Lisp I mentioned in the posting before this one. I have already received mail asking for the name of an archive site, so here is a minimal subset of archive servers that claim to have kcl (Kyoto Common Lisp). This was gleaned by letting archie run for a few minutes, stopping when I had enough. a.cs.uiuc.edu ames.arc.nasa.gov apple.com brl-vgr.arpa bu-it.bu.edu caf.mit.edu cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu cli.com crocus.waterloo.edu csvax.caltech.edu e.ms.uky.edu f.ms.uky.edu funet.fi funic.funet.fi gatekeeper.dec.com hub.ucsb.edu itsgw.rpi.edu jyu.fi labrea.stanford.edu mcsun.eu.net nisc.nyser.net orville.nas.nasa.gov rascal.ics.utexas.edu These are all ftp-able archive sites which claim to have some version of kcl available. Some have a single huge tar file, some have it nicely broken up into parts. I remember cli.com has it in pieces, for example. One should be able to help you. Don't forget to send in your license form. Enjoy. - peterd -------------------------------------------------------------------------- +-------+ Peter Deutsch McGill University | u # u | peterd@cs.mcgill.ca School of Computer Science |/\/\/\/| | a a | \ a / "Love my work, hate my job..." \___/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------