Newsgroups: can.usrgroup
Path: utzoo!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Topic for next UU meeting - Cnews?
Message-ID: <1989Jun13.132614.27100@telly.on.ca>
Organization: The Open Vapourware Foundation (join now!)
Distribution: ont
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 89 13:26:14 GMT

My suggested topic for the next UU meeting: (June 28 at FLIS)

Cnews: The Final Frontier

Maybe some of us who are installing it can give an overview. Having
seen it for a few hours, the most noticable features appear to be:

- lists of files to be batched are in /usr/spool/news/out.going, not
  /usr/lib/news/batch. Actually, a number of things appear to be
  subtly different (from alpha-Cnews) in the way batches are made up;

- Documentation is MUCH better, and there are a number of articles
  which give one a bit of insight into Geoff's and Henry's approaches;

- Installation is also easier. The shell script provided to accomplish
  most of this, build, isn't as intuitive as Larry Wall's Configure, but
  it appears to do the trick;

- Ihave/sendme is now implemented, though your troff needs to know 'pic'
  type graphics to adequately print the documentation for it;

- Expire, in a rather elegant way, now allows articles to remain in the
  history file after they've been expired;

- Much greater NNTP support;

- The method for locking processes (and the 'ln' bug that Chris found)
  has been simply resolved;

- Suggested cron and 'rc' files are supplied;

- bencode and bdecode are supplied as replacements for uuencode and
  uudecode. (Between the new ones, the old ones, and Brad Templeton's
  recently-posted 'abe' encoder, will we have incompatability problems?)

- News-via-mail facilities are there now;

- They've actually included a program called 'superkludge';

So is this an appropriate topic?
-- 

Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
   evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
    Computer salesman's credo:  There's an end-user born every minute
