From: pechter@ocpt.ccur.com
Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent
Subject: Re: Best news systems & readers enquiry
Date: 26 Aug 92 20:06:34 GMT
Reply-To: "Coherent operating system" <COHERENT@indycms.bitnet>
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corp.,Information Services

In article <9208261001.AA05147@dalek.mwc.com> you write:
>
>A personal 2 cents worth:
>
>If a general consensus can be reached in comp.os.coherent about what the
>prefered news package combo is, or perhaps a couple of prefered news
>configurations, it would hopefully be a simple matter to create some
>diskettes users can install with the /etc/install command to automatically
>place binaries and shell scripts in proper directories with appropriate
>permissions and perhaps some minimal default configuration to
>read and reply to comp.os.coherent. Downloadable images of the
>diskettes can be made available on mwcbbs and other sites for people
>to uncompress and dd or cpdir (depending on how the images are made
>available) the image to a floppy diskette.
>
>Such an undertaking should actually be no more than building binaries,
>testing them and placing them in an installable fashion onto floppy
>disks, which shouldn't be more than a couple days of work. The disks
>could be beta'ed by comp.os.coherent readers, given a final blessing by the
> group
>and made available on the various coherent bbs sites. Since I've probably
>opened up a topic to raise some debateable issues, I can start by
>volunteering to build the floppy diskettes, but I would like to see a lot
>of feedback about what should/should not be considered for this. I have
>little personal experience with news software myself (I had used Gnews for
>a while, but have been relying on the feed from IndyServe for several
>months to read/reply to comp.os.coherent) and would rely heavily on this
>group for suggested configurations. Let me make it absolutely clear that
>this would be a personal undertaking and MWC would not be actively supporting
>this. Besides, sleeping at night seems such a waste of precious time...
>
>When making suggestions, please remember that 3.x users must also
>be accomodated, so nn and tin are not feasible for them. I would think,
>however, if the binaries are small enough, installable disks could be
>built which could accomodate nn and tin for 4.0 users and alternate
>packages for 3.x users. I would prefer to not make Gnews available
>for consideration, but if enough of you press for it, I can be as spineless
>as any politician and change my position on this.
>
>To me, this seems simpler than watching the almost daily messages
>about what newsreaders to use and the problems of bringing up readers that
>worked under 3.x to 4.0 (from scratch) and could reduce traffic
>in this area. What do you think? Reply to this group or bob@mwc.com.

Agreed.  Geez I quoted a lot.

I'm testing trn, rn, and tin on my SVR3 box before I go to try to
port it to Coherent.

Also my 386 motherboard bit the big one.

I think that MWC should've just put the stuff on the distribution
disks along with cnews (set to read /usr/lib/news/organization,
/etc/uucpname etc.) so they'd have had an instant success.

Perhaps a Cohware ready to run setup would make some people happy.

Me - hell I spent three hours tweaking your version of elm into my
configuration <grin>.

I will get tcsh up as soon as the motherboard gets swapped (hope for
this weekend.)

Bill
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Bill Pechter, N2RDI           | The postman always pings twice.
        Concurrent Computer Corp.     | pechter@ocpt.ccur.com
        2 Crescent Place, Oceanport, NJ 07757 - Tel:908-870-4780
Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent