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1.1 root 1: Notes for 2.10:
2:
3: There are some incompatiblities between 2.9 and 2.10. None of them
4: should cause a problem, but you should be aware of them. Some conversion
5: is needed.
6:
7: The file storage format has been changed. Rather than storing news in
8: $SPOOL/net.games.rogue/123, an article now goes in $SPOOL/net/games/rogue/123.
9: This permits newsgroup names to be longer than 14 characters and still
10: have subgroups. It also makes directories smaller, resulting in faster
11: performance. The dot files are gone, rather than saving the next
12: article number in $SPOOL/.net.games.rogue as the length of the file,
13: it goes in the active file on the same line as net.games.rogue.
14: Thus, your active file contains lines like
15: net.games.rogue 00123
16: where the newsgroup name and the max article number are separated by
17: a space. The article numbers are ALWAYS 5 digits long and include
18: the leading digits to do this (this is so they can be updated in place
19: without growing the active file). The old active file has been saved
20: as $LIB/oactive in case of emergency.
21:
22: This conversion of directory tree formats has an extra benefit. You'll
23: find that readnews is now considerably faster than version 2.9. The
24: movement of the dot files accounts for much of this, since it is no
25: longer necessary to "stat" every dot file. Additionally, a routine to
26: find a newsgroup in your .newsrc has been modified to keep the
27: file sorted in the same order as active, and a "last found" pointer
28: is used to reduce the find time algorithm from quadratic complexity
29: (on the number of newsgroups) to linear complexity. This makes the
30: total number of newsgroups less of a factor in determining speed,
31: and also keeps everyone's .newsrc cleaned out. It is important
32: that people not store extra junk in their .newsrc, because it will
33: be deleted when they run readnews.
34:
35: Before you do the conversion, you are urged to check your LIB/active
36: file and clean out any duplicates and old newsgroups.
37:
38: Overall recommended conversion order:
39: compile everything in this directory
40: make
41: make the new spool directories:
42: sh cvt.mkdirs.sh /usr/lib/news /usr/spool/news
43: convert the history file (non-USG only):
44: cc cvt.hist.c -ldbm
45: a.out /usr/lib/news
46: convert the active file:
47: sh cvt.active.sh /usr/lib/news /usr/spool/news
48: install the inews binary:
49: su
50: rm -f /usr/bin/inews /usr/bin/rnews
51: cp inews /usr/bin/inews
52: chown news /usr/bin/inews
53: chgrp news /usr/bin/inews
54: chmod 6755 /usr/bin/inews
55: ln /usr/bin/inews /usr/bin/rnews
56: ^D
57: make links to spooled articles (this takes awhile):
58: sh cvt.links.sh /usr/lib/news /usr/spool/news
59: (see below)
60: install the rest of the binaries:
61: su
62: make cp
63: ^D
64: test everything to make sure it all works
65: clean out the old spool hierarchy:
66: sh cvt.clean.sh /usr/spool/news
67:
68:
69: Several shell scripts and C programs are provided to help with this
70: conversion. The above scripts will convert active and create the new
71: directory tree. (Links will be made to the old articles, so news can
72: continue to be read while you are doing this.) Note that once you
73: install the inews binary, any incoming news processed by the new system
74: will not appear in the old system. The above order was chosen to
75: minimize the window during which incoming news could be lost. Once the
76: history and active files are converted, a new inews (and rnews) must be
77: installed, so that any incoming news will be kept in the new format.
78: Since the cross-linking is the time consuming part of the conversion,
79: it is deferred until after the critical window. The commands above to
80: install inews are equivalent to "make cp" except that they only install
81: inews, not readnews or checknews. This is so that anyone reading news
82: while you are cross-linking will be able to get at their news.
83: Otherwise, a "make cp" can be used if nobody will be reading news. You
84: can save the old binaries in case of catastrophe, but converting back
85: once 2.10 has been running for any length of time is not recommended.
86:
87: There are rumors of the cvt.links.sh part not working on a USG system.
88: If you have problems, the idea is to make a shell script with lines like
89: ln net.news.group/* net/news/group
90: for each newsgroup, then to run the shell script. An alternative
91: for USG is (roughly)
92: sort /usr/lib/news/active -u -o /usr/tmp/dirs.2.9
93: cat /usr/tmp/dirs.2.9 | sed -e 's;\.;/;' > /usr/tmp/dirs.2.10
94: cd $SPOOL ; past /usr/tmp/dirs.2.9 /usr/tmp/dirs.2.10 |\
95: awk '{print "ln "$1"/* "$2}' | sh
96: On an older system (e.g. V7) your ln command won't handle multiple
97: source files - you can create a shell script to do the same thing.
98:
99: There are also rumors of cvt.mkdirs.sh not being able to make the
100: directories, for reasons nobody can figure out. Being unable to
101: reproduce this, all we can offer is that if it happens to you,
102: you should do it by hand (an appropriate shell script can be made
103: easily with the editor.) Please let us know if you figure out what
104: is going on. It is normal to get "File exists" errors from mkdir
105: for local newsgroup (no dots in the name) and from parent newsgroups
106: (e.g. net.rec, net.bugs, net.sport, net.news) which you can safely ignore.
107:
108: When you are satisfied that everything is working OK, run
109: cvt.clean.sh $SPOOL
110: and it will remove the old dot files and directories.
111:
112: The method used to determine if an incoming article has already been
113: seen locally has been changed. On V7 systems, profiling showed that
114: rnews spent about 1/2 of its time in fgets reading the history file.
115: It now uses the dbm(3) library to hash the message ID of each article.
116: To avoid incompatibilities between 2.9 and 2.10, if you have more than
117: one incoming news feed, run the provided cvt.hist program, which will
118: enter all the message ID's from your 2.9 format history file into
119: the hashed database. (On USG systems, there is no dbm library, but
120: fgets is much faster, so the problem should not be so pronounced.
121: inews 2.10 on a USG system will continue to use the old history file
122: method to detect duplicates.) The text history file is maintained as
123: it was in 2.9, for human use.
124: cc cvt.hist.c -ldbm
125: a.out $LIB
126:
127: Other incompatibilities:
128:
129: The headers now meet the USENET format standard and RFC822. Headers
130: stored will look verbose, and contain much more information. Headers
131: transmitted to other systems will work with old B news systems or new
132: ones. Once all your neighbors convert to the new standard, you can
133: take out the #define OLD in defs.h; this will prevent Posted and
134: Article-I.D. from being generated, saving some transmission costs
135: and making the stored articles a bit smaller. The format of dates
136: has been changed to conform to RFC822. If this causes your "Mail"
137: command to stop working with the -M option, it's easy to fix Mail.
138: In head.c, the first function "ishead" calls another function
139: "isdate". Simply comment out the 4 lines calling isdate.
140:
141: The user interface is roughly compatible, but the users will notice
142: a few differences, and there are a few extensions. There are two
143: major differences in the interface. The first is that postnews
144: now prompts for a "Distribution". This defaults to the same as
145: the newsgroup (and will be omitted in this case), but allows the
146: user to conveniently enter a Distribution header line. It also
147: makes them think about where their message is going to be sent
148: out to. Any newsgroup(s) can be typed here, but normally you
149: just type either nothing, or a class distribution (e.g. "net",
150: "btl", "nj", "world"), restricting the distribution to that
151: class of sites.
152:
153: The other change is that, on systems without page mode in the tty
154: driver (e.g. on systems with PAGE defined in defs.h), after printing
155: long articles with the pager, it will print a ":" and wait for
156: the user to hit return before printing the next header. This
157: is to give the user a chance to read the whole article before
158: the next header forces it off the top of the screen.
159:
160: Some less immediate interface changes: Headers are displayed
161: in a format which is more compact but more information is displayed
162: than before. If you want to see the article ID or full path,
163: or the date or newsgroups, the "h" command will show them.
164: The "H" command can be used for a full, verbose header dump.
165:
166: Control messages are slightly different. In particular, 2.10 now
167: requires that a newsgroup be created with a "newgroup" control message
168: (e.g. inews -C) before it can be used. If an incoming article is in
169: some newsgroup that is not in the local active file, the article will
170: be locally stored in newsgroup "junk" and not forwarded to other systems.
171: This will prevent the accidental creation of typographical errors
172: by systems running older versions of news. Also, the rmgroup control
173: message has been made less dangerous. The defs.h parameter MANUALLY
174: is now defaulted to on. This means that when an rmgroup message comes
175: around, you will be sent mail asking you to remove the group, but the
176: group will not actually be removed. This prevents someone from
177: accidently or deliberately removing an important newsgroup such as
178: net.general. If you control several machines and want to have
179: rmgroup messages automatically remove the group without your
180: intervention, disable MANUALLY.
181:
182: expire used to automatically archive news in /usr/spool/oldnews if
183: that directory existed. Now it won't archive it unless you give
184: it the -a option.
185:
186: There is now a shell script called localize.sh which makes whatever
187: local mods you need to news, so you won't have to keep making the
188: same fixes for every release. See localize.sample for an example
189: version, but you will want to fix it up to reflect your local
190: preferences. Normally the affected files are Makefile and defs.h,
191: plus copying (with no changes) postnews, but you can make whatever
192: changes you need here.
193:
194: CAUTION: If any of your neighbors run 2.9 or older news, you must
195: be sure you have OLD defined in your Makefile. (The distributed
196: localize.sample will define OLD.) Otherwise, your site will generate
197: articles with no Posted: or Article-I.D.: headers, resulting in
198: the "Inbound news is garbled" diagnostic at the remote end.
199:
200: When you ship your news software to a new site, you must now send
201: a copy of your active file, so that the appropriate newsgroup
202: directories and active file can be built. This was not necessary
203: in 2.9 because unrecognized incoming newsgroups were automatically
204: created, but they are thrown away in 2.10.
205:
206: After the conversion, you should create two new newsgroups: junk
207: and control. The first is for messages that are in an invalid
208: newsgroup (so you can see what's getting thrown away). The second
209: is for control messages. Ordinary users probably won't want to
210: read either, but as administrator you might want to. To create
211: them, mkdir $SPOOL/junk $SPOOL/control, and add
212: junk 00000
213: control 00000
214: to the end of $LIB/active.
215:
216: Note the addition of some new programs to $LIB. These include
217: recmail (a program which takes a mail message on stdin, figures
218: out who the To: and Cc: lines refer to, and invokes /bin/mail
219: with those arguments [not changed] and with the file on stdin;
220: recmail is used by the reply command) and caesar (a program used
221: to decode rotated jokes; it can also be used to create rotated jokes).
222:
223: Version 2.10 has some experimental batching provisions in it.
224: See the batch and unbatch programs, and the F and U options in
225: the sys file, for more details. There are some related UUCP
226: modifications in the uucp directory that can also help performance
227: considerably. All this is very new, and while it appears to run
228: OK, caution is advised in installing batching software. You must
229: also make sure your neighbor is prepared to receive batched news;
230: this is normally true if the neighbor is running at least 2.10.
231:
232: If you have an old C compiler which does not support the (void)
233: cast (V7 or C book based), you can add -Dvoid=int to CFLAGS in
234: the makefile to get the code to compile.
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