evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) (04/06/89)
What IS the status of Cnews? There was a 'full release' version due at Usenix but I heard it was delayed. Is it ready yet? If not, what's the latest release level, and what are the holes which the 'release' version is expected to fill? I also notice that TMN news is expected out soon. Does anyone anticipate using the inews/expire mechanisms from Cnews and readers/posters from TMN, or is it better to stick with one throughout? Thanks.
geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) (04/07/89)
In article <8904052337.AA23221@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: >What IS the status of Cnews? There was a 'full release' version due at >Usenix but I heard it was delayed. Is it ready yet? C news is mostly in private beta test; we are waiting for Henry's expire before the beta test kit will be complete. The delay has been due to Henry and I being sick, an emergency in my family that kept me out of town for most of a month, and my inability to put fire in Henry's belly earlier :-). >If not, what's the latest release level, and what are the holes which >the 'release' version is expected to fill? The current public release is *still* C alpha; the production release fixes a long list of omissions and some bugs. In particular, full disks, control messages and moderated groups are treated correctly, there are better mechanisms for coping with problems in the groups being sent by your feed, the batcher is simpler than in the alpha release, the input subsystem copes with #! c7unbatch (or whatever), expire will be able to retain history longer than the articles, essentially all the software will have no fixed-size buffers to be overflowed, there is support for i-have/send-me (batched only) and NNTP (batched upon receipt), and there is finally some installation documentation. (I may have missed something, the alpha release was a long time ago, as if you needed reminding.) It's still fast, though most of our energy since the alpha release has been on robustness and completeness. Someone locally has even ported the alpha release to MS-DOS(!); no, I don't know how he did it. One thing that may not be finished in time for the production release is a faster inews (as opposed to rnews). It's not much of a problem for posting a single article (even Henry says so :-), but for gatewaying mailing lists into newsgroups, something faster would help machines such as jarvis.csri.toronto.edu (nee utjarvis) or ucbvax or uunet. Unfortunately, inews is also where most of the site-specific customisation happens, so it's a difficult trade-off. However the screams from CSRI are a little unsettling, and some of those folks run one of the major U of T mail relays (neat.ai.toronto.edu, utai to most of you) and they keep reminding me about the problem at dinner :-), so we will likely provide at least a minimal hook for a faster inews. >I also notice that TMN news is expected out soon. Does anyone anticipate >using the inews/expire mechanisms from Cnews and readers/posters from >TMN, or is it better to stick with one throughout? I imagine that Henry and I will at least look at what the competition has been up to, in part because we supply only a trivial readnews, but it will take something major (such as power, compactness, simplicity and speed) to shift us from using rn, which is certainly powerful. P.S. Henry and I have been considering the invitation to speak at UU on the insides of C news when this is all over. Talking about your work is much easier than doing it. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu It's all Henry's fault. (TM)