Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!ginosko!aplcen!haven!mimsy!mojo!smaug
From: smaug@eng.umd.edu (Kurt Lidl)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: C news penetration
Summary: Commentary, just commentary
Message-ID: <1989Oct14.052236.20538@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 14 Oct 89 05:22:36 GMT
References: <8910121231.AA17253@image.soe.clarkson.edu.> <1989Oct12.165913.18364@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Oct13.220948.570@rpi.edu> <1989Oct13.225725.15574@utstat.uucp>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The C News System)
Reply-To: smaug@eng.umd.edu (Kurt Lidl)
Organization: Merriversity of Uniland, College Purgatory
Lines: 54

In article <1989Oct13.225725.15574@utstat.uucp> geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes:
>I put the hardcoded paths in NNTP's batch.c, not Jean-Francois.

That was an evil deed :-(

>It seemed to me that there was no existing mechanism in the NNTP source to
>allow all the directory names that we use to take non-standard values
>and there were only a few #defines for the directory names, and since we
>don't own NNTP and didn't want to produce "C NNTP", I didn't retrofit
>the C news configuration mechanisms into NNTP, I just hardcoded the
>pathnames.  It didn't seem to matter given the state of the NNTP
>configuration mechanisms at the time.  I may have missed something,
>though.  With any luck, Stan Barber has integrated our changes smoothly
>into NNTP; I haven't checked yet.

I would just like to add this plea for future releases of the code,
especially for the documentation.  Have a minimal release note on
using nntp with C-News.  While I think that C-News is the greatest
thing since sliced bread (after all, I run it here) -- I was rather
frustrated with the documentation.  No mention of how nntp shows up
in any really helpful manner.  I was sadly deluded into thinking that the
ihave/sendme stuff was relevant to nntp transfer...  A couple of
questions to other sites on campus that had news running with nntp
shed enough light on the matter so I could be up and running with
nntp.

While maybe even most of the people responsible for installing the
C-News systems across the nation were veterens, *I* certainly was not.
I *wish* that I had known lots of little things that I know now.
I *wish* that they had been documented someplace.  I have read lots
of newsgroups for the last 2 years, and have followed C-News from
the first "real" (non-alpha) release of it.  Still I learned quite
a bit from actually playing with the installation.

I hope that at least something gets into the docs for nntp for
your next "patch" or "upgrade/suppliment" or whatever.  Also, a little
bit of knowledge about the common flags that you might want in your
sys files (eg "F" for nntp...) would have been greatly appreciated.

If anybody is interested in starting a guide to UseNet management,
let me know.  I would like to be in on the project.  Conversely,
if there is already an existing guide, please tell me where
I can find TFM!  Thanks.

>Geoff Collyer		utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu

I really admire the C-News system -- it runs extremely well on
mojo.eng.umd.edu -- a Sun 3/60 with 12 megs and a 300 meg CDC for
/var/spool/news!
--
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==  Kurt J. Lidl  (smaug@eng.umd.edu)	(301) 454-3184	==
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