Subj : Re: soupgate and alternatives
To   : Oli
From : Avon
Date : Thu Jan 28 2021 16:39:03

On 27 Jan 2021 at 07:13p, Oli pondered and said...
 
 Ol> Soupgate looked for 0000????.msg Soup files and couldn't open the
 Ol> 0000????.MSG Soup files. This problem was introduced when I changed the
 Ol> extension for Fidonet messages from ".MSG" to ".msg". It exposed a

Good catch... I also found that with an earlier version when running the
export function Soupgate was looking for .CLO not .clo files...
Perhaps this is the same issue?

 Ol> Unfortunately the more I use soupgate the less I like it. It's simple to
 Ol> use, but it's approach to FTN<->Internet message gating is way to
 Ol> simplistic. No real charset conversions, no TZUTC support, dumping the
 Ol> complete RFC822 header into kludge lines (even multi-line fields),
 Ol> non-Gatebau compliant MSGID/Message-IDs. It's the worst case scenario
 Ol> for dupes: changed datetime, changed text body, changed MGSID, a bunch
 Ol> of weird kludges.

Many kludges can be disabled by config file. I agree it's not perfect but the
windows version has been working OK for several years for me without too many
niggles on either side of the gate.

 Ol> I wonder if it is best to look for better alternatives. I guess even a
 Ol> rewrite from scratch would be not much more work then extending and
 Ol> bugfixing Soupgate and Spoon.

One reason I like the combo is that they are two stand alone exec files that
I can install, config and run. It doesn't require a huge overhead to install
something more complex.. But I agree fixing bugs and extending features would
be great. Just wish I had the coding skills to do it :(

 Ol> I don't mind doing a bit more bug fixing on Soupgate, but I don't think
 Ol> I want to dive into the "double free" Spoon code. I let Spoon connect to
 Ol> my JamNNTPd server. It didn't even try to login a user (username and
 Ol> password is in the config) and crashed the server and then itself. Isn't
 Ol> it possible to run vSoup in wine? Or is there some other Soup client
 Ol> that can be used on linux?

It may be the way spoon talks to your NNTP is different to the INN NNTP I am
using. I know the later compiled version we have got working to pull down
news seems to work alright and I can post to NNTP which does require a
username and password on my system.. and that works also... it's just the
hand off at the end when the system borks on the known error that is an issue

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