Path: utzoo!yunexus!stpl!yunccn!nccnat!root
From: root@nccnat.UUCP (Paul Shields)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Readnews for the PC
Keywords: B News 2.11 #8 for MS-DOS...coming soon to a network near you
Message-ID: <290@nccnat.UUCP>
Date: 7 May 88 15:49:16 GMT
Article-I.D.: nccnat.290
Posted: Sat May  7 11:49:16 1988
References: <1259@uokmax.UUCP> <1280@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>
Reply-To: shields@yunccn.UUCP
Organization: York University, Toronto Canada
Lines: 44

>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?

Yes. I have. It does rnews, expire, batching and unbatching. The user
interface is readnews. 

[...]
>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.

That's me.  It uses the UULINK package by Lauren Weinstein.  I'll have it 
ready for beta testing real soon now.  Total size is about 250K worth of 
context-diff's from Patch level 8 of Netnews. 

The remaining work is in fixing some memory limitations on the PC, massaging
rnews and recmail, and documenting the patches. 

[...]
>  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.

The patches for the most part serialise the forks and simulate pipes and
links. The hardest one here was rnews, which in its current state has been
cracked and twisted to make it work. 

>                                               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.

I agree.  I use two compilers, Lattice 3.20, and Microsoft 5.0.  There
are problems with both.  Lattice doesn't have complete Unix enough libraries,
and I can't get MSC to open more than 16 files at once (req'd for expire.)
-- 
Paul Shields, shields@yunccn.UUCP   If you think you have a subconscious,
or yunccn!nccnat!root               you have a software integration problem.