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- bsnews - Bootstrap News
- copyright 1989 Ronald Florence
- MT C-Shell version by David Beckemeyer
-
- Recently a bsnews program was posted to the net for Unix(R) systems.
- It was described as follows:
-
- "Bootstrap News is a collection of programs which enable a leaf node to
- take a news feed without installing a full news package. News
- articles are accumulated in a Unix-mail type spool file, where they
- can be read with a mail reader such as `Mail' or `elm'."
-
- The original Bootstrap News was a collection of programs and shell
- scripts which receive news from a feeder site and turn it into mail.
- From this idea, I made this version of Bootstrap News for MT C-Shell.
-
- It is similar in concept and purpose to the original, but it is vastly
- different in implementation. For this reason, the orginal makefile
- and readme files do not apply to the MT C-Shell version and so they
- aren't included here. All files contain the original author's copyright
- notices. It was his idea, he should get the credit.
-
- The MT C-Shell Bootstrap News includes the following programs:
-
- rnews - run by the remote host (feeder) site via
- 'uux - yoursys!rnews' to read single or
- batched articles. Compressed batches
- are not supported yet.
-
- pn - a simple news poster.
-
-
- Installing Bootstap News
-
- Most people won't have to re-compile the programs, but the source
- is provided just in case. You will need Mark Williams C to
- recompile the code, or you will have to change the code for
- a different compiler.
-
- There is an install.sh shell script for automatically installing
- the Bootstrap News programs and data files. Examine this file
- to see if it looks OK for your installatin. Make any necessary
- changes and type '.\install' to install bootstrap news.
-
- The install script does the following. It creates the directories
- \usr\lib\news and \usr\spool\news and puts the following files there:
-
- \usr\lib\news\sys - The sys file contains just one word,
- the name of the system that feeds you news.
- It must be the first line of the file and
- there can be no trailing white space.
-
- \usr\lib\news\org - The name of the organization corresponding
- to your site. It is used by pn.prg to
- when posting news articles.
-
- \usr\lib\news\seq - Contains the curent sequence number in
- ASCII. Probably start at 1. The pn.prg
- increments this value each time you
- post an article.
-
- The install script also creates three user accounts on your system:
- "netnews", "news", and "usenet". The netnews account is for reading
- news articles. All news artices are sent as mail to this account.
- The other two accounts are used for news administration.
-
-
- Reading News
-
- To read news, you log in as "netnews" and just type mail.
-
-
- Posting News Articles
-
- To post an article to the net, use the pn program. Just type 'pn'.
- The program will ask you for the newsgroups and the subject and then
- it will invoke the text editor \usr\bin\me.prg to allow you to create
- the text of the article. You will have to recompile the program to use
- a different editor.
-
-
- Re-Compiling The Programs
-
- Look over the definitions in the makefile and in rnews.c and pn.c
- and change as nesessary. Type 'make install' to rebuild the
- programs if required.
-
- David Beckemeyer
- Beckemeyer Development Tools, Oakland, CA
- david@bdt.UUCP
- {ucbvax,uunet}!unisoft!bdt!david
-
-
- What follows is the orginal notice from the original Bootstrap News
- readme file:
-
- Permission is hereby granted for unlimited non-commercial use of these
- programs, on condition that the copyright notices are left intact and
- any modifications to the source code are noted as such. No warranty
- of any kind is implied or granted for this material.
-
-
- Ronald Florence
- Maple Lawn Farm, Stonington, CT
- ron@mlfarm
- ...{hsi!aati,rayssd}!mlfarm!ron
-