Proposal to solve 286 problems ourselves

[Robert C. White]

This message is aimed at all the Microport System V/AT v.2.x out there...

	I've been using Microport SysV for about 6 months now, and overall
I've been extremely happy with the product so far: I find that generally
I have no problem porting well-written software to it (news 2.11.13,
patch, smail, uemacs, jove, spread, etc), and that the system runs 
very solidly & reliably (I even feed news to a couple of local sites).

	However, besides the fact that I still don't have any information
on how to upgrade to 2.3 (I'm still stuck at 2.2), I find that there are
a couple of really annoying problems that keep nagging me:

	1) the fact that mail returns a *failed* status on messages longer
	   than 32kB.  This is especially annoying with smail, since smail
	   will dutifully send back every long message you receive to its
	   sender.

	2) the fact that cron executes *some* commands twice.  This is
	   most annoying with some commands that purge log files, etc.

Now, I was wondering: since the net is a great place to meet other uport
users with the same problems, why don't we put our resources together & 
try to solve these problems ourselves?  In some cases (like the clock 
that can't keep the time under 2.2 or the tty driver that panics), there 
isn't much we can do, but for things like mail or cron, these are separate 
executable images: we simply have to find or write a Public Domain version, 
and post it to the net!

Or, at least, we could post the various solutions that some of us have
surely come up with to solve those problems that uport seems to have
fairly low on their priority list.

I guess the first question is: are there any commonly available P.D. versions
of mail and cron?

-----------------

PS. To get the ball rolling, I guess I can explain how *I* cope with the
    above problems.

    1) my solution to the smail/mail problem is to have a special version 
       of smail that doesn't return failed remote mail to the sender, but
       rather to the postmaster.  This is a tiny change in deliver.c in
       the smail sources, if anyone is interested,  I can EMail it to them.

    2) my solution to the cron problem is uglier: each of my cron commands
       toggles a "lock file" in /tmp so that they will only execute 1/2 the
       time.  This isn't perfect since System V/AT does not double-execute
       *every* command.

Well, now let's hear from all of you uPort users out there...
-- 
Denis Fortin                            | fortin at zap.UUCP
CAE Electronics Ltd                     | philabs!micomvax!zap!fortin
The opinions expressed above are my own | fortin%zap.uucp at uunet.uu.net