Rn Kit, Version 4.3
Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall
You may copy the rn kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try to
make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.
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Please read all the directions below before you proceed any further, and
then follow them carefully. Failure to do so may void your warranty. :-)
After you have unpacked your kit, you should have all the files listed
in MANIFEST.
Installation
1) Run Configure. This will figure out various things about your system.
Some things Configure will figure out for itself, other things it will
ask you about. It will then proceed to make config.h, config.sh, Makefile,
and a bunch of shell scripts. It will also do a make depend for you.
You might possibly have to trim # comments from the front of Configure
if your sh doesn't handle them, but all other # comments will be taken
care of.
2) Glance through config.h and common.h to make sure system dependencies
are correct. Most of them should have been taken care of by running
the Configure script.
If you have any additional changes to make to the C definitions, they
can be done in the Makefile, in config.h, or in common.h. If you have
strange mailboxes on your system you should modify mbox.saver to correctly
append an article to a mailbox or folder.
If you are on a machine with limited address space, you may have to
remove some of the special functions of rn to make it fit. This is
easily done by undefining symbols in the System Dependencies section
of common.h. You should run "make depend" again to be safe.
3) make
This will attempt to make rn in the current directory.
4) make install
This will put rn, newsetup, newsgroups, Pnews, and Rnmail into a public
directory (normally /usr/local/bin), and put a number of files into the
private rn library (normally /usr/lib/news/rn). It will also try to put
the man pages in a reasonable place.
5) Read the manual entry before running rn. It's quite different from
readnews.
6) If you are trying to make it work with NNTP, be sure you have
installed the NNTP inews and the file that contains the name of the
NNTP server. RRN expects that the NNTP is at least version 1.5.
7) Try rn, and play with some of the switches. You may want to make -/
default on your system. This is done in common.h. You may want to modify
which header lines are displayed by default--this is done in head.h.
To change default values of enviroment variables on a system-wide basis
without recompiling rn, put switches into file INIT in the rn library.
8) IMPORTANT! Help save the world! Communicate any problems and
suggested patches to my faithful servant, sob@bcm.tmc.edu, so we can
keep the world in sync. If you have a problem, there's someone else
out there who either has had or will have the same problem.
If possible, send in patches such that the patch program will apply them.
Context diffs are the best, then normal diffs. Don't send ed scripts--
I've probably changed my copy since the version you have.
Watch for rn patches in news.software.b. Patches will generally be
applyable (is that a word?) by the patch program. If you are just
now bringing up news and aren't sure how many patches there are, write
to sob@bcm.tmc.edu and he'll send any you don't have.
9) If you are going to hack on rn, please read the HACKERSGUIDE first.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.