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:
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)
The old patch for signed control messages was found here.
The newer patch for signed control messages have been found here.
Some performance patches have been located here.
The first y2k patches has been found here.
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.
from Peter Much
check the README for details.
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.
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.
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.
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.
from Charles H. Lindsey, found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/
check the README for details.
from Charles H. Lindsey, found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/
check the README for details.
from Charles H. Lindsey, found at ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/chl/CNEWS/
check the README for details.
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.
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"
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.
from Dan Glover
Y2K extensions for short Years in Date
check the README for details.
from Egil Kvaleberg
Y2K extensions for short Years in Date
check the README for details.
from Dennis Davis
Y2K extensions for short Years in Date
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.
from Egil Kvaleberg
implemented fix that will make C-news work with Posix-compliant shells (i.e. bash).
from Hans Freitag
Fix for the comandline option '-x'. bash don't kill the quoting characters (i.e. bash).
from Dirk Meyer
Fix incorrect memset, causes .overview gets not cleaned of nonexisted entries.