Very Computer

Believe me, Andy... a news *reader* program is going to be the easiest part
of doing news under MINIX!  I've been looking into this (after all, one of the
major reasons I got into MINIX in the first place was the fact that I wanted
to do news on my home computer).  I brought the sources for 2.11 news over to
my machine, and it took me several hours just to get the damn MAKEFILE to
work!  Seems as though MINIX make does not allow you to define a macro in terms
of another macro.  Thus, if you have the following in a makefile:

        FOO = BAR
        BAZ = ${FOO}

then BAZ takes on the value "${FOO}" rather than "BAR".  It's going to be a
while before we'll see news on MINIX (tho I'm working on it...)

BTW - my machine IS currently up and running as a mail site.  If anyone wants
to e-mail to a MINIX machine, you can send it to "...decvax!encore!jrpmnx!paradis".
Consult the .signature for alternate paths to encore.

   +----------------+  Jim Paradis                  linus--+
+--+-------------+  |  Encore Computer Corp.       necntc--|
|  | E N C O R E |  |  257 Cedar Hill St.           ihnp4--+-encore!paradis
|  +-------------+--+  Marlboro MA 01752           decvax--|
+----------------+     (617) 460-0500             talcott--+
...coated with sesame seeds, and garnished with lark's vomit!

[Personal opinion follows!  Your opinion may be opposite.]

I hope if someone does this they will also consider looking at the
'vnews' sources that come with the Usenet news distribution; after
installing and trying to use [on Unix] the above news reader here for
about a week, I've decided that it is more useful for quickly looking up
some article you remember in the past than reading the news.  It has a
lot of familiar 'vnews' commands missing, takes a long time to start up,
and once it's shown you a list of articles, seems to assume you've read
them even if you haven't.  But, as I said, this is just opinion.

I used to have 'vnews' running under DOS back when I received news on
the PC, it is not that hard to port; it took about 3 days I think... the
one that comes with the news distribution is *not* the enormous, slow,
machine dependent one that requires 'afbuild' to build a big hash table
of the articles, etc.
--

does this mean you have uucp working for minix? and a mailer? i'm looking to
port dcp to my tty driver but if you have something that already works,
why don't you post it. i'll be most greatful if i could get uucp or clone
working without the effort of a full port.

--
Bing H. Bang      +--------------------------------------------------------+
Harris/Lanier     |OS/2 on PS/2: Half an operating system on half a machine|
Atlanta GA        +--------------------------------------------------------+

Yes, I have "uucp" and a mailer working on my system.  But I don't think
it's quite ready to release for general consumption yet (Just in the last
hour I discovered a bug where it doesn't deal with spool files whose
names are exactly 14 chars long...).  The uucp is DCP with the g-packet
driver stolen from UUPC (the latter being a better 3-window protocol to
DCP's 1-window protocol).  The mailer is "dmail", to which I've had to do
a fair bit of hacking to get around its BSD-isms.  I hacked together my
own little *y-weeny "sendmail", which doesn't work too well... Pete
Housel mentioned that he got "smail" working on his machine.  Pete?  Could
you tell me more?  I took one look at smail and wondered if it would be
worth the bother... but if you've got it working maybe I'd like to see it.

I'll release these when I think they're ready.  If some of you REALLY REALLY
can't wait, I suppose I could send out alpha-test versions... but by email
only... caveat downloader, and all that...

   +----------------+  Jim Paradis                  linus--+
+--+-------------+  |  Encore Computer Corp.       necntc--|
|  | E N C O R E |  |  257 Cedar Hill St.           ihnp4--+-encore!paradis
|  +-------------+--+  Marlboro MA 01752           decvax--|
+----------------+     (617) 460-0500             talcott--+
...coated with sesame seeds, and garnished with lark's vomit!

Well, the news reader vn probably woundn't be too difficult to port to
MINIX, since it only uses termcap and not curses, and much of the stuff
specific to SysV or BSD seems to be well #ifdefed.  However once you get it
ported, it won't do you any good 'cause there won't be anything there for it
to read!  Vn, or Larry Wall's rn, or readnews, or whatever program you
use for reading, only reads the news; it doesn't get the news articles
onto your system.  All vn or any other news reader is is a fancy way to
do a "more" or its equivalent on a bunch of files and keep track of which
ones have already been seen by the user.  
  In order to get netnews running on your PC you need other stuff besides
just the newsreader.  As Jim Paradis pointed out, the reader's the easy part.
One needs:
        1. A serial tty driver.  The Paradis driver is probably good enough
for netnews use if you either A) have an AT or B) don't mind having to
transfer all your news at 1200 baud.  This has been a main stumbling block
to running netnews under MINIX.
        2. A uucp-like comm program (e.g. DCP).  Since you'll probably be
getting a newsfeed from a UNIX site, your system needs to speak the same
protocol that it does, and this means UUCP.  There are at least three PD
UUCP clones about; the one I'm familiar with is DCP.  Last I heard,
Jim Paradis had ported DCP to MINIX, but there were still some problems
with file transfers.  Has this been fixed?
        3. The netnews-transfer software.  This is the software that both
ends of the news link use to handle the collections of news articles
("batches") that are transferred over UUCP.  The purpose of the news software
is to read the incoming batches, break them up into individual articles,
do some messing around with the headers, put copies of the articles in the
appropriate subdirectories of /usr/spool/news, and ,if your system feeds
another site, prepare batches to go to it.  There are also auxilary programs
like "expire", which deletes news articles older than a specified limit.
The most commonly used news software on the Usenet is called "B News".
        4. Once you've got all the above, then you need a news reader
program like vn.

Quote:>About a year ago, Henry Spencer mentioned that he and a colleague also had a
>news reader program, although I don't remember much about it.

I think you're referring to C News by Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer of
the Univ. of Toronto.  It is *not* a news reader; rather it is a
rewritten-from-scratch replacement for the current B News, with several
improvements, most notably improved speed.  Currently the C News software
is in alpha test (not even beta test yet), but it's reportedly fairly
bug-free even so.  Either B News or C News should be possible to port
to MINIX (or at least easier to port than porting them to MSDOS is :-).
Netnews is a fairly large and complex system (the source code to C
News runs ca. 600K bytes), but there shouldn't be too much trouble in the
port.  Spencer and Collyer worked fairly hard to ensure portability among
various dialects, including V7; I'm not too familiar with B News internals,
but I believe it also has appropriate #ifdefs for V7.
  So you see, Andy, it should be possible to get a PC under MINIX onto this
here network, but it's considerably more involved than just porting the
one program you mentioned.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Todd
USSnail:820 Annie Court,Norman OK 73069
UUCP: {allegra!cbosgd|ihnp4}!occrsh!uokmax!rmtodd