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C/C++ Users Group Library 1996 July
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1993-08-24
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Simple NEWS 1.91
================
August 25, 1993
by John McCombs
Modified by Michael Studte, John Dennis,
Kai Uwe Rommel and Daniel Fandrich
INTRODUCTION
============
'Simple NEWS' is an news add-on for UUPC. It is designed to handle
Usenet news as a leaf node, and offers:
- Threaded news reading. This allows you to be much more
selective about what you read, enabling you to cover many more
newsgroups.
- When a cross-posted article is read, the news-reader
marks all the other instances of the article as read, too.
- Separate rc files are kept for each user which record the individual
articles that you have seen. This is in contrast to some readers
which simply record the highest article number read.
- Usual range of response facilities: follow-up news, reply by mail,
forward by mail, save article/thread to disk.
- The extract function (key "w") saves articles to a user-specified
file in the UUPC mailbox format (with a header of 20 hex 01's).
Thus, extracted news articles can be read with the mail program
later, at the user's convenience.
- Built-in support for ISO 8859/1/2/3/4/9 character sets (RFC 1341
and RFC 1342) and a single key interface to the metamail MIME
decoder (or other user-specified program).
- Article storage in two files per newsgroup, rather than one file per
article. This results in an enormous saving (up to 3:1) in disk
space on disks with a default cluster size of 4 KB per cluster.
- Processing of batched compressed or uncompressed news. Control
messages are not processed.
- Duplicate cross-posted articles are killed during the unbatch stage.
- Post articles are unbatched and uncompressed. You can only post
to your 'mailserv' -- you cannot feed another site. Posting can
only be done from within the news reader SNews.
- 'Received date' oriented expire to maintain the news database.
- Works with UUPC/extended 1.11n or greater.
I looked at porting Tass and wnews, but in the end decided they were
far more effort than it was worth, as these news systems were more
complicated than was necessary for a single user (at a time) DOS
implementation, especially when the PC is likely to be a leaf node.
Generally, the algorithms used are simple, but the speed is adequate
for a feed for several users expiring after 5-10 days. The main
bottleneck occurs during the 'expire' operation, which must rewrite
the entire news database.
'Simple NEWS' was built rather quickly (and it shows in places :-) to
suit my own needs. I'm distributing it in the hope you might find it
useful. [jm]
[Posting is a bit of a kludge. The D... and X... files are created,
then queued using the UUCP program. If you look in the source code
you will see this is all a bit dodgy. I should sort this out some
time. I've tested it by posting to a Waffle system which isn't all
that fussy, and by posting to a CNEWS/Unix SYSV system, which is
rather particular].
System Requirements
-------------------
- A minimum of PC-XT with 120k free RAM running under MS-DOS 2.0 or
newer (has been tested on versions 3.3 and newer). The unbatch
program requires much more free RAM if it invokes uncompress on the
received batches (i.e. not UUPC/extended ver. 1.11x). If you use a
lot of TSR's, you could get around this by having your feed use 12 bit
compression instead of the default 16 bit.
- 200k disk space for the program files plus several megabytes for the
newsbase, depending on size of the feed.
- You must have installed UUPC/extended and the optional program, UUCP
in particular. UUPC/extended version 1.11n and on should work. You
do not need any UUPC sources to build Simple NEWS.
The SNews newsreader can be used by multiple users to read news on a
network if the following conditions are met: TempDir is different for
each computer, articles are not posted simultaneously to the same
group by more than one user, and the newsbase manipulation commands
unbatch.exe, expire.exe and rmgroup.exe are only run when no other
programs are using the newsbase.
The sources have been compiled with Borland's TC ver. 2.0 and BC++.
Porting to other MS-DOS ANSI C compilers should be relatively easy.
[Known non-ANSI functions include Borland's console I/O routines, and
the intdos() function].
Support for OS/2 has been added to this version of SNews on an
experimental basis. Although it appears to be stable, it has not yet
been as thoroughly tested as the MS-DOS version, so please report any
problems you have to the author.
Introduction to Version 1.91
----------------------------
This is an updated version of SNews version 1.90 for MS-DOS. Two
derivatives of older versions of SNews are available: for OS/2 (SNews/2
ver. 2.0), and for running under KA9Q NOS (SNews ver. 1.21). The OS/2
version is a "bound" executable and should work under MS-DOS as well.
Please see the section at the end of this file "MAJOR CHANGES TO SNEWS
1.91" for specific information that differs from previous versions of
SNews.
Support
-------
I don't want to be *deluged* with complaints, bug reports, or
suggestions for improvements. I can think of enough of these for
myself, :-). And no whining about the dodgy processing of the headers.
This will be fixed sometime.
If you have a problem, please try hard to solve it before you contact
me. If you find a bug let me know. Unless a bug absolutely cripples
you, you'll have to wait for the next release. This policy arises
largely out of the fact that email costs me $$$. [jm]
When contacting the author(s) with a problem, contact the last author
mentioned for whichever version of SNews you are using. The original
author cannot be responsible for changes made by a third party (and,
according to the license, cannot be held responsible for an unchanged
version, either). [df]
CAVEATS AND COPYRIGHT
=====================
Version 1.12 of this software is copyright (1991) by John McCombs,
Christchurch, New Zealand <john@ahuriri.gen.nz>
Version 1.90 is copyright 1992 by Michael Studte/John Dennis (Shinohara
Industries)
Version 1.91 is copyright 1993 by Daniel Fandrich <dan@fch.wimsey.bc.ca>
or <72365.306@compuserve.com> (some portions are copyright
1992 by Kai Uwe Rommel <rommel@jonas.bofe.sub.org> or
<rommel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>, and copyright 1985,
1989 by Bill Davidsen)
This package is free software, but NOT public domain; you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License, version 1, as published by the Free Software
Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
See the file COPYING, which contains a copy of the GNU General
Public License.
The compress program and documentation included with the SNews
distribution were not written by the SNews authors and are not a formal
part of SNews. The are part of the public domain compress ported by
Donald J. Gloistein.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
===============
I'd like to thank Steve Kohlenberger, of PreSoft Architects, for
making suggestions and doing some testing for