Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!occrsh!uokmax!rmtodd
From: rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: C News on a Mac IIx
Message-ID: <3398@uokmax.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jun 89 06:10:11 GMT
Reply-To: rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd)
Organization: University of Oklahoma, ECN
Lines: 49

I've installed C News on my Mac IIx running Apple A/UX v1.0.1 (still waiting
for the 1.1 upgrade disks, sigh); for those not familiar with A/UX, it's SVR2
with Berkeley job control and networking.  Here is a report of how things went:

 As bill@twwells.com pointed out, various places in the makefile use test(1),
and make tries to find a test executable somewhere in the path, and since
A/UX has no test executable (test only exists as a shell built-in), this
bombs.  I solved the problem by sticking a little shell script in
/usr/local/bin to execute the sh builtin test and return appropriate exit
status.  
  The shiny new stdio library does not only not work under A/UX, it passes
the supplied test with flying colors! (The docs mention SunOS4.0 as the
only system where this is true; guess now we can add another to the list.)
Using the new stdio lib. causes the expire regression test to do strange
things; large pieces of the output start disappearing from the messages
that are being fprintf'ed to stderr.  Anyway, don't even think of using
the C News stdio lib.  
  Something seems to be amiss with superkluge; at least, the regression
test for it (part of the expire test) bombed with complaints about bad
message-id format.  I'm not sure why it does this, and since I don't plan
to use superkluge, I don't really care a lot.
  Australian readnews won't even compile.  Since anyone in his right 
mind is using rn anyway, I haven't spent too much time looking into this one,
either.  You'll be happy to know that rn compiles and runs just fine on A/UX.
  Being a somewhat paranoid sort, I specified -B/usr/lib/big/ in the compiler
options for making C News, so that it would use the "big" versions of the
compiler passes; in my experience out there many programs will overflow the
tables of the "regular" A/UX C compiler.  I rather doubt that anything in C
News is likely to be big enough to break on the "small" cc, but I didn't try
it, having had entirely too much hassle with programs that did break in the
past.
  The C News distribution contains versions of queuelen for HDB and for 
old w/subdirectory versions of UUCP.  Alas, A/UX uses old UUCP without
subdirectories (*despite* what the uucico(1) man page says!), so minor
hacking here is required. If anyone is interested, I can post the hacked
version.

   One thing I discovered: the inews shell script supplied is somewhat
sensitive to ordering of options.  In particular, 
inews -C newsgroup -d local will *not* create a local-only newgroup message,
as the Distribution: local will get tacked onto the body of the newgroup
message, not the header.  Most of you will by now have seen the results of
my accidentally discovering this :-( :-(.  Alas, looking at inews it looks
like this may be a bit difficult to fix; that has got to be one of the
nastiest shell scripts I've ever seen, and I don't see any obvious ways to
fix it without making it even nastier.
-- 
Richard Todd   rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us  or  rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  
                                    aka     ...!sun!texsun!uokmax!rmtodd