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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!bofh.dot!warwick!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!news.ox.ac.uk!news From: Ray.Bellis@psy.ox.ac.uk (Ray Bellis) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.osf.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc,comp.sys.sun.misc Subject: Re: DNEWS NNTP News Server Binaries Available Date: 17 May 1996 11:42:23 +0100 Organization: O.U. Dept. of Experimental Psychology Lines: 47 Sender: rpb@axp01.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk Message-ID: <wwvpw83oa28.fsf@axp01.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk> References: <319bb6c7.0@161.29.2.2> <VIXIE.96May17014858@wisdom.vix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: axp01.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk In-reply-to: vixie@vix.com's message of 17 May 1996 08:48:58 GMT Cc: andrew.hilborne@onyx.net X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.1 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.aix:76854 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3764 comp.unix.osf.misc:3125 comp.sys.sgi.misc:22754 comp.sys.sun.misc:23924 In article <VIXIE.96May17014858@wisdom.vix.com> vixie@vix.com (Paul A Vixie) writes: > why are sources not being made available? One would assume that it's because they charge for it. I've just downloaded the demonstration version and it has absolutely the *worst* installation routine I've ever seen. It uses sequences of shell scripts that look like they were written by an inexperienced DOS batch script programmer. All of the scripts use hard coded paths in them, and the paths are repeated over and over within each script. They *surely* should have been using shell variables and then there'd only be one change in each script! Here's another example of how poorly these guys seem to know Unix: --8<--8<-- find /var/spool/dnews -print | xargs chown news --8<--8<-- Why on earth don't they do `chown -R news /var/spool/dnews' instead. It ought to be a hell of a lot quicker. One assumes they haven't actually read the man page for `chown', which on every Unix system I've ever used (and I've used lots) has a recursive flag. None of the installation scripts have any sort of error detection in them, either. If you try to re-run the install script it falls over because all of the `mkdir' aren't wrapped to make sure the directory doesn't already exist! There's also some question about what exactly happens if a user wants to download a group which dnews hasn't yet downloaded. It would appear that the user will have to wait until the next time the upstream server is contacted. I liked the idea, but if the commercial product is anything like the demo I won't be buying it. Does anyone know of a good cacheing proxy-NNTP daemon? Ray. -- __ __ Computing Officer, MRC Research Centre in Brain and Behaviour, /_/ /_/ \/ Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University / \ / / / <http://www.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk/~rpb> <mailto:Ray.Bellis@psy.ox.ac.uk>