Shell script news software

[Peter Renzland]

>From article <8261 at rpp386.Dallas.TX.US>, by jfh at rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum):
> Someone called from Edmunton recently looking for B news to run on an
> Altos 586. ... too small to run real B news, due to a 128K per process
> memory limitation.  I was wondering if anyone has a collection of shell
> scripts which will implement B news for a leaf node.

I do, but it's in a state of flux, and some of it is rather ugly.  If one or
two people are really desperate and promise not to show the code to strangers
('cause I'd be embarrassed), and perhaps even agree to improve things, I'll
be glad to help.  I'm not ashamed of the expire; it's fast, small (<50 lines),
and very versatile.  Ontmoh keeps articles between 1 and 200 days, and
there is a newskeep command to tell users how long each newsgroup is kept and
a sortnewsrc command that re-arranges your subscription list to show volatile
newsgroups first.

The unbatcher is ok too, although it doesn't quite handle multiple downstream
sites and feeds properly yet.  It needs the new awk (to close files).  The
older one used csplit, so it's limited to 99 articles/batch, and it's slower.
The newsreader is ok, but it's most suitable for (restricted) BBS users and
novice users, and only allows posting to local newsgroups.  (vn is nicer.)
The 16 bit (un)compress takes 450K, so that's out for "someone from Edmonton".

Again, this stuff is not in any shape to distribute to strangers.  And if I had
the time to clean and package it, I'd probably bring up Cnews instead. :-)

-- 
Peter Renzland @ Ontario Ministry of Health  416/964-9141  peter at ontmoh.UUCP