gsm@mailgsm.mendelson.com (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) (04/30/91)
wayne@dsndata.uucp (Wayne Schlitt) comented on my posting: >Lines: 36 >In-reply-to: root@mailgsm.mendelson.com's message of 24 Apr 91 01:24:06 GMT > >In article <303113@mailgsm.mendelson.com> root@mailgsm.mendelson.com (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) writes: >> >> >> [ ... ] >> >> For those who never heard of GNEWS it is a full feature news system. >> GNEWS is written under Coherent and tested under Coherent. > >for those who have not heard, GNEWS is a news reader that runs under >the gnu emacs system. gnews has been around for at least 2 years and >is very powerful and very stable. i really dont think it is going >into another beta test phase. > You are thinking of the Free Software Foundation's G'News. It is pronounced G'newz or GNUz. It is a pun on their name GNU (pronounced G'NU). Since my product is called GNEWS (pronounced GEE Newz) there is no conflict. Unless you have never heard G'news pronounced or heard of GNU or the FSF. There is absolutely no connection between G'News and GNEWS. >> >> GNEWS was written from scratch, but it is loosley based upon cnews. The >> newsreader is loosley based upon the PSU VM/CMS news reader. > >this doesnt sounds like the GNEWS that everyone else knows about. you >should probably change the name. As I said, there is no need to change the name. In fact, having similar products will help people to realize there is a difference. It will also help spread the word about the FSF. > >> >> It is much smaller than cnews. It is also designed for the COHERENT evironment. >> And I think it has a lot less bugs and a much better newsreader. >> > >cnews doesnt have a news reader. cnews also isnt that large and it is >very bug free. i am sure that henry spencer would like to know about >any bugs you have found in cnews. unless, of course, you are talking >about a different cnews than what everyone else knows about. > I am talking about the CNEWS that everyone knows and loves. I have it running on my UNIX system. It is large and it has many bugs. I know because I have installed it. I gave up applying patches when it would no longer compile under ESIX (UNIX sysV r3.2). At least once a week uunet feeds me a batch the cnews barfs on. I have written GNEWS to avoid those problems. As for cnews not having a reader you are mistaken. It is called appropriately readnews. Not to many people use it, because it barely works and is very stupid. Obviously, I am far more familiar with cnews than you. When I installed cnews I rewrote a lot of the newsreader. I had to just to get it to work. Most of the commands did not. GNEWS is the outgrowth of wanting a good newsreader. CNEWS is a monumental project and took many hours of long dedicated work by both Henry Spencer ancd Geoff Collier. Perhaps Geoff's are destined to write news programs? The major strength of cnews is that it will run on many systems. I think that is also a liability since it requires a great deal of effort to maintain and install. I have no such lofty ideals. All I ever wanted was a good news system that runs on coherent. GNEWS is also the outgrowth of a very unsuccessful attempt at porting cnews to coherent. It just reached the point that I felt that a news system designed with coherent and its limitations in mind, was a better idea than trying to port cnews. Being familiar with cnews, I did not design in those limitations that bothered me the most. GNEWS is by no means the best code I have written. It is not the most efficent or tricky design I could have used. It is (mostly) simple and elegant. Each program performs a piece of the process. Where ever possible, I have opted for simple and readable instead of elegant. I did not build tools I did not need. For example, cnews has a fairly large program to feed other sites. I don't. I have a program that builds an index of articles with all the relevant information and another program that reads the index and builds batches. I don't have a program to limit a feed. If you want to limit a feed use awk to edit the index. You see, not only did I complain about cnews, but I put my code where my mouth is. I am sorry that you confused my GNEWS with the FSF's G'NEWS reader. They are separate products whose names are pronunced differently. Theirs is a news reader and mine is a (almost) full news system. ------ Copyright (C) 1991, Geoffrey S. Mendelson. All Rights Reserved. Except for usenet followups, may not be reproduced without permsission. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Computer Software Consulting | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Geoffrey S. Mendelson I've written and debugged almost eight thousand geoffrey@mendelson.com LINES of C code under Coherent in the last two mwcbbs!mailgsm!geoffrey months. :-) (215) 242-8712 And my wife still speaks to me!
gsm@mailgsm.mendelson.com (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) (05/05/91)
<WAYNE.91Apr29073949@dsndata.uucp> wayne@dsndata.uucp (Wayne Schlitt) wrote: > >hmm... i thought the folks that wrote cnews worked hard to get it to >run under the small model on the pdp-11 and xenix 286. there may be >places that no longer fit, but i would imagine that any work that was >done to make cnews work under the 64k limit would probably be accepted >for the official cnews release. > To set the record straight: most of the problems I encountered were porting cnews to ESIX UNIX sV.3.2d. It seems lots of things changed slightly. The problems I have had with porting stuff to Coherent, seem to be "mysterious" bugs. For example smail. The person who ported smail to coherent do a good job. Unfortuantely for me, he did not use the same options as I did. I found, and am still finding many bugs in smail. They seem to be in the original code, but the same code runs fine on my UNIX system. Some are fixed by fixstacking the module, he used 1000 hex (4k) I'm up to 2800 (10k). Some are fixed by moving arrays to the code segement, ahead of the "main()". Some just go away and come back later. I don't want to fall prey to the "if it ain't developed here it's ain't good" syndrome, but I see lots of stuff ported to coherent that just dosen't work. What I have tried to fix, seem to be things that should not fix these bugs, but they do anyway. Very strange. But to get back to GNEWS. It is developed and tested under Coherent. Any bugs found in GNEWS are placed there by the author :-). They are not supplied by the compiler or libraries. ------ Copyright (C) 1991, Geoffrey S. Mendelson. All Rights Reserved. Except for usenet followups, may not be reproduced without permsission. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Computer Software Consulting | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Geoffrey S. Mendelson I've written and debugged almost eight thousand geoffrey@mendelson.com LINES of C code under Coherent in the last two mwcbbs!mailgsm!geoffrey months. :-) (215) 242-8712 And my wife still speaks to me!