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From: h...@zoo.toronto.edu
Newsgroups: info.bsdi.users
Subject: C News Cleanup Release released, finally
Date: 27 Sep 94 05:37:14 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
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Message-ID: <199409270537.XAA18539@BSDI.COM>
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Originator: dae...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
The much-fabled Cleanup Release of C News is out. To borrow a phrase from
our long-forgotten initial release, "you can't possibly be as happy about
this as we are" :-).
I enclose copies of its README and README.changes, which should tell
interested parties most of what they want to know. Of particular note to
the audience in this mailing list is that this release was developed on a
BSDI system and hence should be fairly easy to put up on such a system. :-)
One caveat: you *need* BSDI 1.1 for this -- the 1.0 shell is hopeless.
(My development system is still a 1.0, but it has a 1.1 shell.)
================ README =================
This is the Cleanup Release of C News. Sept 1994
The current C News distribution can be retrieved by anonymous FTP from
ftp.cs.toronto.edu (file pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z) or ftp.zoo.toronto.edu
(file pub/cnews.tar.Z). Please avoid major use of FTP during our peak
hours (0800-1800 Eastern time, zone -0500). Major archive sites such as
ftp.uu.net and ftp.funet.fi also usually have the latest distribution.
See README.changes for what's new and wonderful.
See README.install for installation instructions.
Warning: the documentation stinks, worse than usual. :-) README.install
and the stuff in notebook/ are current. The stuff in man/ is thought to be
correct but may be incomplete in small ways. The stuff in doc/ is mostly
out of date and should not be trusted too far.
We are grateful for financial support of C News development by the
following, none of whom are to blame for the final result (some more
detailed information can be found in the "sponsors" directory):
UUNET Communications Services Inc. (provider of Usenet news feeds)
ClariNet Communications Corp. (publisher of a Usenet-format E-newspaper)
=======================================
================ README.changes =================
These are just the high points.
First, the source has been extensively reorganized, so don't bother diffing
against older releases.
Many things have been speeded up, fixed, or improved. The regression tests
are much more comprehensive, and are now formally part of installation.
Overview support has been fully integrated and is faster than it used to be.
It includes support for putting the overview files somewhere other than the
article tree.
Included -- currently as contributed software, not fully tested or well
integrated -- is a small transport-only NNTP implementation. Further work
on this stuff is anticipated.
The installation procedures have been revamped substantially, with much of
the work now done by makefiles. The old conf/build is now quiz, and the
interrogation is rather shorter. See README.install for details. Among
other things, there is now some provision for checking correctness of an
install after it's done.
Batcher locking is much improved, some degree of parallel operation is
possible, THE FORMAT OF BATCHPARMS HAS CHANGED (for the better), absolute
limits on batch length are possible, and there are some preliminary hooks
for using the batcher to run outgoing NNTP transmission.
Newgroup/rmgroup processing is now controlled by the controlperm file,
directory removal after rmgroup is automatic (once the last articles
expire), newgroup is *much* fussier about group names, the newsgroups
file is properly maintained, and sendsys/version control messages are
ignored unless the return address is of the form "newsmap@...".
Expire is faster and smarter and can be told that history files are in a
different directory. Doexpire runs upact and expov. Upact is much faster
while remaining a shell file; updatemin is gone.
Inews/injnews error checking is better and it has provision for supplying
From addresses of the form user%s...@do.main.
There is support for use of gzip for batch compression, and a generalized
facility for supporting other compressors. Newsrun is generally smarter
and supports an option that says "process plain input but not compressed
input".
Dbz has been split into two parts: dbz functionality, and dbm emulation
on top of it. It has several new bits of functionality, including automatic
tag sizing (if you don't know what this means, don't worry about it).
The old "what kind of Unix do you have?" question is gone, replaced by a
few more "do you have feature xyz?" questions.
The getdate() routine, source of many compilation headaches, is gone.
For those who truly believe that bundling all sorts of control functions
into a single command is a Good Thing, there is now a cnewsdo command
which provides a bundled interface to the C News maintenance commands.
Of course, the individual commands are still available too.
There is a new setup command, mergeactive, for setting up your active
file based on someone else's.
Newswatch is smarter, can be run frequently without adverse effects, and
has a hook for running your own private command(s) for dealing with space
shortages.
We've started splitting the zillion-command manual pages down into smaller
ones, although this is by no means finished yet.
Relaynews, apart from being faster, now copes fully with article trees
split across file systems, doing symbolic links and/or data copying as
necessary.
There is support for SVR4 statvfs() space checking and UUCP queue checking.
Shell-file locking has been organized and packaged up for cleanliness and
ease of change. Trouble reporting now all goes through one command, "report",
which can be altered as necessary to suit local conventions. (The NEWSMASTER
configuration variable no longer exists, as a consequence of this.)
The software has been built on BSDI and on a recent Solaris.
=======================================
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utzoo!henry
From: h...@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: C News Cleanup Release released, finally
Message-ID:
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 05:37:00 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 120
The much-fabled Cleanup Release is out. To borrow a phrase from our
long-forgotten initial release, "you can't possibly be as happy about
this as we are" :-).
I enclose copies of its README and README.changes, which should tell
interested parties most of what they want to know.
================ README =================
This is the Cleanup Release of C News. Sept 1994
The current C News distribution can be retrieved by anonymous FTP from
ftp.cs.toronto.edu (file pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z) or ftp.zoo.toronto.edu
(file pub/cnews.tar.Z). Please avoid major use of FTP during our peak
hours (0800-1800 Eastern time, zone -0500). Major archive sites such as
ftp.uu.net and ftp.funet.fi also usually have the latest distribution.
See README.changes for what's new and wonderful.
See README.install for installation instructions.
Warning: the documentation stinks, worse than usual. :-) README.install
and the stuff in notebook/ are current. The stuff in man/ is thought to be
correct but may be incomplete in small ways. The stuff in doc/ is mostly
out of date and should not be trusted too far.
We are grateful for financial support of C News development by the
following, none of whom are to blame for the final result (some more
detailed information can be found in the "sponsors" directory):
UUNET Communications Services Inc. (provider of Usenet news feeds)
ClariNet Communications Corp. (publisher of a Usenet-format E-newspaper)
=======================================
================ README.changes =================
These are just the high points.
First, the source has been extensively reorganized, so don't bother diffing
against older releases.
Many things have been speeded up, fixed, or improved. The regression tests
are much more comprehensive, and are now formally part of installation.
Overview support has been fully integrated and is faster than it used to be.
It includes support for putting the overview files somewhere other than the
article tree.
Included -- currently as contributed software, not fully tested or well
integrated -- is a small transport-only NNTP implementation. Further work
on this stuff is anticipated.
The installation procedures have been revamped substantially, with much of
the work now done by makefiles. The old conf/build is now quiz, and the
interrogation is rather shorter. See README.install for details. Among
other things, there is now some provision for checking correctness of an
install after it's done.
Batcher locking is much improved, some degree of parallel operation is
possible, THE FORMAT OF BATCHPARMS HAS CHANGED (for the better), absolute
limits on batch length are possible, and there are some preliminary hooks
for using the batcher to run outgoing NNTP transmission.
Newgroup/rmgroup processing is now controlled by the controlperm file,
directory removal after rmgroup is automatic (once the last articles
expire), newgroup is *much* fussier about group names, the newsgroups
file is properly maintained, and sendsys/version control messages are
ignored unless the return address is of the form "newsmap@...".
Expire is faster and smarter and can be told that history files are in a
different directory. Doexpire runs upact and expov. Upact is much faster
while remaining a shell file; updatemin is gone.
Inews/injnews error checking is better and it has provision for supplying
From addresses of the form user%s...@do.main.
There is support for use of gzip for batch compression, and a generalized
facility for supporting other compressors. Newsrun is generally smarter
and supports an option that says "process plain input but not compressed
input".
Dbz has been split into two parts: dbz functionality, and dbm emulation
on top of it. It has several new bits of functionality, including automatic
tag sizing (if you don't know what this means, don't worry about it).
The old "what kind of Unix do you have?" question is gone, replaced by a
few more "do you have feature xyz?" questions.
The getdate() routine, source of many compilation headaches, is gone.
For those who truly believe that bundling all sorts of control functions
into a single command is a Good Thing, there is now a cnewsdo command
which provides a bundled interface to the C News maintenance commands.
Of course, the individual commands are still available too.
There is a new setup command, mergeactive, for setting up your active
file based on someone else's.
Newswatch is smarter, can be run frequently without adverse effects, and
has a hook for running your own private command(s) for dealing with space
shortages.
We've started splitting the zillion-command manual pages down into smaller
ones, although this is by no means finished yet.
Relaynews, apart from being faster, now copes fully with article trees
split across file systems, doing symbolic links and/or data copying as
necessary.
There is support for SVR4 statvfs() space checking and UUCP queue checking.
Shell-file locking has been organized and packaged up for cleanliness and
ease of change. Trouble reporting now all goes through one command, "report",
which can be altered as necessary to suit local conventions. (The NEWSMASTER
configuration variable no longer exists, as a consequence of this.)
The software has been built on BSDI and on a recent Solaris.
=======================================
--
"It was blasphemy that made us free." | Henry Spencer
-- Leon Wieseltler | h...@zoo.toronto.edu
|