Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News on a Mac IIx
Message-ID: <1989Jun24.210627.25374@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <3398@uokmax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 89 21:06:27 GMT

In article <3398@uokmax.UUCP> rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd) writes:
>  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.)

Argh.  I was afraid of that.  If you can figure out what's going on and find
a test that will spot the incompatibility, we'd love to hear about it.  (Geoff
tried fairly hard to do this for SunOS 4.0 but couldn't, admittedly under a
severe time constraint.)  Replacing *part* of a library is always fraught
with potential portability problems.

>Using the new stdio lib. causes the expire regression test to do strange
>things...

Glad to hear that *something* spotted it, anyway.

>  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.

If you get around to investigating it, I'd be curious to know what the
problem is.  If not, no big deal.  Somebody who really cares can sort it
out.  Our opinion of the issue can be seen by the name we gave the thing...

>  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...

Again, we'd be curious to hear, but are not too concerned.  Our major motive
for including readnews was to have at least a nominally complete system, so
that it would not be necessary to retain any of B News.  The main problem
with rn is that naive users who just want to read the urgent bulletins from
the system administration are intimidated by it.

>  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.

Please do, or at least mail it to the c-news address so we can incorporate
it in a future update.  I wanted to include such a version, but didn't
dare because I didn't have anywhere I could test it.

>   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...

Oops.  This will be recorded as a bug.
-- 
NASA is to spaceflight as the  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
US government is to freedom.   | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu