Editorial

I am using C News since Spring 1994 anw with this page I like to give some feedback of my problems and solutions from then to now. All patches are now based at the last Release:

Cleanup Release of C News, with patch CR.G April 1995

The current C News distribution can be retrieved by anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.toronto.edu (file pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z) or ftp.zoo.toronto.edu (file pub/cnews.tar.Z). Please avoid major use of FTP during our peak hours (0800-1800 Eastern time, zone -0500). Major archive sites such as ftp.uu.net and ftp.funet.fi also usually have the latest distribution.

We are grateful for financial support of C News development by the following, none of whom are to blame for the final result (some more detailed information can be found in the "sponsors" directory):

UUNET Communications Services Inc. (provider of Usenet news feeds)

ClariNet Communications Corp. (publisher of a Usenet-format E-newspaper)

First, I like to point out a few places that helped me in improving cnews.

The old patch for signed control messages was found here.

The newer patch for signed control messages have been found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/.

Some performance patches have been located at ftp://ftp.new-york.net/pub/utils/.

The first y2k patches has been found at http://www.dangl.freeserve.co.uk/linux/news/y2k.html.

The patches in 6 years ....

  1. input/newsrun

    from Peter Much

    The standard cnews use "uncompress" to expand newsbatches. To accept batches compressed with "gzip" it's simple to call "gzip -d" instead of "uncompress". Old compressed files are detected by gzip and are handled without a problem.

  2. Linux problems solved

    from Peter Much

    check the README for details.

  3. batch/sendbatches

    from Dirk Meyer and Peter Much

    I need to do accounting over the bytes the batcher send to a system. Therefor I needed to know for which system the batcher is called. An easy way to provide that, was to export the $sys variable before calling the batcher.

    sendbatches did not clean its tempfile when an enpty leftover file exists.

  4. namecheck.awk util/namecheck.t ctl/reg/n.1r

    from Dirk Meyer

    In Germany we have many newsgroups which have longer name components. I changed the maximum length from 14 to 24. I know this limit is mostly obsolete, and I have not found a system which still use and old filesystem, which did limit the name of a directory to 14 characters. Of cause this may be still the cause somewhere around the world. Fixes the regression test.

  5. relay/fileart.c

    from Dirk Meyer

    Due to the growing amount of control-messages, I want to set different directorys and different times to expire them. I created in the active file the groups control.cancel control.newgroups control.rmgroups and control.checkgroups. With a few changes in fileart.c c-news detect this groups and use the specialized directorys. I had seen a previous patch somewhere, but it had the names hardcoded in the code. My solutions is to find the name from the given command, so even a control.sendsys or a control.extension newsgroup is possible.

  6. util/queuelen.tay

    from Peter Much

    Due to a compile-time limit in uustat (taylor-uucp) you can get only the status of 201 Jobs. If you have mail-batches for a system and they sum up with the maximum number of newsbatches to a value greater then 200, queuelen will never return the true number of newsbatches. In result c-news will continue to create batches. use only the grade "d" for newsbatches, so I set a "hack", which count all batches for the same grade. A permanent solution would be counting the configured grade from the configuration.

  7. ctl/newgroup ctl/rmgroup ctl/checkgroups

    from Charles H. Lindsey, found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/

    check the README for details.

  8. ctl/newgroup ctl/checkgroups

    from Charles H. Lindsey, found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/

    check the README for details.

  9. exipre/doexpire

    from Charles H. Lindsey, found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/

    check the README for details.

  10. ctl/newgroup ctl/rmgroup ctl/checkgroups

    I like to used regular expression in the second field of the file controlperm. This check is done by awk, so I changed the operator in that awk command. A line in controlperm can now be set to:

    mynet .*.spam.net ncr q

    and suppress all messages from this domain.

  11. input/bunzip2 input/makefile batch/viauux batch/compcun

    from Dirk Meyer

    More and more uucp-Sites like to use more compression schemes. I created a file like gunzip for the program bzip2. The INN batcher like to generate rnews commands with a header line line "#!gunbatch", and this batches pile up as bad. I found no easy way to include support for this. Instead I added support for different command and compressors while batching for a system. I can now add in the batchparms file calls like: "viauux -cmd rnews-bzip2". For compability reasons I can generate those funny headers with a short extension of compcun. So a compressor for an INN site may be: "compcun -cmd gunbatch -prg gzip"

  12. ctl/checkgroups

    from Dirk Meyer

    Due to Gatebau it is common use to for gateway to convert a '!' in group name into an underscore '_'. Therefore a leading '_' appears in newsgroups component.

  13. libc/getindate.c libc/getabsdate.c

    from Dan Glover

    Y2K extensions for short Years in Date

    check the README for details.

  14. libc/getindate.c libc/getabsdate.c

    from Egil Kvaleberg

    Y2K extensions for short Years in Date

    check the README for details.

  15. libc/getindate.c libc/getabsdate.c

    from Dennis Davis

    Y2K extensions for short Years in Date

  16. expire/upact maint/checkactive

    from Dirk Meyer

    gawk with "--enable-non-decimal-data" fails. All article numbers have a leading 0, this is now an octal value. To check and count, this is now stripped.

  17. relay/transmit.c

    from Egil Kvaleberg

    implemented fix that will make C-news work with Posix-compliant shells (i.e. bash).

  18. inject/inews

    from Hans Freitag

    Fix for the comandline option '-x'. bash don't kill the quoting characters (i.e. bash).

  19. nov/expovguts

    from Dirk Meyer

    Fix incorrect memset, causes .overview gets not cleaned of nonexisted entries.

  20. to be extended ...