To: cbosgd!uucp-news
Subject: Vnews status

I have done quite a bit to the vnews internals.

Vnews now generates the article index for a newsgroup using a file
called artfile instead of openning each article in the newsgroup;
this makes entering a new newsgroup faster.  Currently records
are added to artfile by a program called afinsert which is invoked
from the sys file.  This requires a mod to inews to pass the history
line to afinsert.  There is a program called afbuild which rebuilds
artfile from the history file.  Since afbuild has to open all the
articles in the spool file, it takes about as long to run as the
expire program does, which I hope is acceptable.  Of course, expire
could be rewritten to deal with both artfile and the history file
at some point.

I have changed the vnews source around quite a bit.  I have squeezed
it to the point where it should fit on a PDP-11.  One problem I faced
was that the files funcs.c and rfuncs.c contained a number of routines
that were not needed for netnews, so vnews currently does not share
any source code with the rest of netnews.  What I have done, however,
is to take many of the vnews routines and put them in a library called
rlib.a so that they can be used by other netnews programs.  The file
/usr/local/src/cmd/news/lib/routines.doc on cbosgd contains a copy of
the documentation on the routines in rlib.a.  I can mail a copy to
this list if people don't have access to cbosgd.

The library comes with a shell program called setup to handle compila-
tion options.  This is hopefully a simpler approach than the localize.sh
stuff that comes with release 2.10.  (For example, if you do not specify
which version of UNIX you are running under, setup figures it out.)
Setup creates files named config.h and newsdefs.h, which specify the
oeprating system and other news parameters, respectively.  It also
creates a file called makedefs, which can be prepended to a makefile or
shell procedure.  Setup currently does not define everything that pro-
grams like inews need, but it could be expanded without too much difficulty.

The "ud" (unsibscribe to discussion) command has been installed in vnews
but needs a little work.  The rest of vnews appears to be in pretty good
shape at this point.

I am not going to be able to do much on vnews for the next several weeks,
but I would like to try to get a release of netnews out sometime in the
forseeable future.  How are other pieces coming?
				Kenneth Almquist
