Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pacbell!att-ih!occrsh!uokmax!rmtodd
From: rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Readnews for the PC
Message-ID: <1259@uokmax.UUCP>
Date: 4 May 88 23:58:52 GMT
References: <1280@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>
Reply-To: rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd)
Organization: University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
Lines: 35

In article <1280@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> jal@galaxy.ee.rochester.edu (John Lefor) writes:
>I got a version of uucp for the PC working recently and 
>am now interested in getting a newsfeed.  Has anyone converted
>a news reading program (such a rn, vnews, etc) over to the
>PC or will I have to work on it myself?
Just for the record, a news-reading program by itself won't do much good;
you also need to port the 'rnews' program (or some equivalent) that reads
in the compressed news batches and inserts the separate articles into
the spool directory.  You also need an 'expire' program to get rid of old
news, unless your disk is a lot larger than mine :-).  There's a lot of
stuff to get right.
Hmm..I remember some time back that a "new site" map entry appeared from
someone claiming to be running B News 2.11 under MS-DOS.  Don't know
anything more about it.  Also, there's a news-handling program part
of the UFGATE Fido-Usenet gateway package.  I believe one of the
authors, Tim Pozar, is on the net (pozar@hoptoad).  I don't use the package
myself, but I know people who do.  I don't know whether there is an
independent news-reader as part of the package or whether you have to
read the news after it's been converted to Fido format.  Fido message-
reading software is appallingly primitive in its interface to those
used to rn; also somewhere in the Fido software is an undocumented
#-of-lines limit that may bite you on long messages (esp. source postings).
  If you're considering porting News to the PC, it'll take a lot of work.
I know, I started on a port of C News to MS-DOS before giving up and
going on to other things.  The netnews software is written for a Unix
environment and heavily uses some features (links, pipes, fork) that
require a good deal of effort to work around.  You'll also find that, as
on any large software project on the PC, that a large portion of your
time will be spent tracking down bugs caused by broken compilers.  Maybe
someday we'll have a real C compiler for the PC, but I'm not holding
my breath.
--
Richard Todd		Dubious Domain: rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu
USSnail:820 Annie Court,Norman OK 73069 	Fido:1:147/1
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"MSDOS is a Neanderthal operating system" - Henry Spencer