What is XRN? XRN is a Usenet News reader for the X window system. It requires an NNTP server to talk to (i.e., it cannot read news from local disk files), and the NNTP server must support the XHDR command (most servers nowadays do; if yours doesn't, XRN will complain when you try to run it). XRN is currently maintained by Jonathan Kamens. Bug reports or comments about it should be sent to bug-xrn@kamens.brookline.ma.us. Please do *not* write to that address with basic questions about compiling the program; if you are unfamiliar with compiling X applications and the instructions below are not sufficient, you should seek help at your site. Versions of XRN prior to 7.00 were maintained by Ellen Santovich and Rick Spickelmier. XRN is a Usenet-friendly News reader! I have striven to make XRN adhere to all relevant standards and to help users avoid the common pitfalls of participation in the Usenet. To that end, all releases of XRN starting with 9.02 are compliant with the Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval (GNKSA), a standard which defines how News readers should behave to make the Usenet a better place for everyone. See <URL:http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/> for more information about the GNKSA. XRN's GNKSA review can be viewed at <URL:http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/Evaluations/xrn-9.02beta4.txt>. Where to get XRN The XRN home page is <http://www.mit.edu/people/jik/software/xrn.html>. Source code for the most recent production release of XRN can always be found at <ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/xrn/xrn.tgz>. The most recent beta-test release of XRN (if there is a beta release more recent than the last production release) can be retrieved from <ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/xrn/beta.tgz>. The file <ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/xrn/xrn-linux.tgz> contains a binary XRN release for Linux, based on the most recent production release. These files are GNU tar archives compressed with GNU zip. The current production release and the current Linux binary release are also available in the X Consortium's contributed software archive, in the directory <ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xrn>. Interesting files in the XRN distribution There are a number of files in the XRN distribution besides the actual source files for the program. I maintain some of these files actively. Others are left over from before I started maintaining XRN, and I have not reviewed them for correctness or updated them; use the information in them at your own risk. In the following list, asterisks indicate files which I have tried to keep up-to-date (this more files may be updated in future releases, especially if people send me feedback about the out-of-date ones): COMMON-PROBLMS A list of common problems and questions about the program, with explanations and solutions. COPYRIGHT Describes the copyright restrictions on XRN. I have left the University of California copyright intact, despite the fact that it's not clear at this point how much of the code was actually written by UC employees, because that's the easiest thing to do and it doesn't do any harm. * ChangeLog A list of changes from previous releases of XRN. * README This file. * README.* Notes about compiling XRN in specific environments. For example, README.Linux contains notes about compiling XRN on Linux systems. * TODO A list of pending bug fixes and improvements to XRN. If you're interested in helping to develop XRN, picking one of the items in this list and digging around in the source code to see what you can do about it is a good way to start. This file is sort of "half up-to-date," because I've been adding new items to the beginning of it, but the items at the end of it are left over from before I took over maintenance of XRN, and some of them may be inaccurate. contrib/* Various scripts, hints, etc. contributed by XRN users and not "officially" part of XRN. * doc/rfc977.txt The Internet RFC governing NNTP, the Network News Transport Protocol, which XRN users to talk to the server. * doc/strtok.doc Documentation of the strtok() implementation included with XRN. * doc/vprintf.doc Documentation for the vprintf() implementation included with XRN. * doc/vprintf.port The original vprintf() implementation from which the one used in XRN is derived. still-to-do/* Various bug fixes that have not yet been examined or incorporated into the program. Some of these are probably obsolete. I inherited them when I took over maintenance of the program, and I haven't done anything with them. Supported/tested platforms XRN has been compiled and run on a large variety of platforms; it should compile pretty easily on most platforms. The maintainer uses Linux (ELF gcc and C libraries) with X11R6 libraries (XFree86 3.1.2). Other successful platforms reported by users include SunOS 4.1.3, OSF/1, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris 2.x, BSD/386, and SGI. XRN probably won't work with X11R4. R4 is a very old and obsolete release, and I do not have the resources to continue to support it while doing on-going development which takes advantage of features found only in newer X releases. Therefore, please do not send me bug reports about XRN compiled with X11R4; if you want to use XRN, you'll have to get a newer version of X with which to compile it. Rick Murphy <murphy@ufp.dco.dec.com> has a version of XRN that runs on VMS, available as <ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/dxrn.tar.Z>. His version of XRN also will compile with a DECwindows interface on UNIX, as well as with a Motif interface with some "bells and whistles" that this version of XRN does not have. Integrating DXRN into the code base of XRN (i.e., this package) is on my TODO list, but I doubt it'll get done in the short term. What happened to the Motif interface? Previous versions of XRN, up to and including version 7.00, included support for building XRN with Motif instead of the Athena widget set ("Xaw"). However, the Motif support has been removed (temporarily, I hope) in later releases. There are two primary reasons for this: 1) The implementation of Motif support was not parallel to the Xaw implementation. As a result, the Motif interface behaved differently (and in some cases incorrectly) from the Xaw interface, and furthermore, it was extremely difficult to keep the Motif interface in sync with the Xaw interface when changes were made. 2) Newer releases of XRN include a significant clean-up of the XRN code base. This clean-up was necessary in order to introduce much of the new functionality that is included in new releases. It was also necessary because, to be honest, the code base was disgusting. The bits of Motif code scattered all over the XRN code base were making it virtually impossible to do the code clean-up, so they had to be removed. A volunteer is in the process of restoring the Motif support to XRN, and in fact, current beta releases have rudimentary Motif support in it. However, this support is not yet complete or supported, and I do not suggest that people use it at this time. Furthermore, the volunteer has run into some problems and currently does not anticipate being able to finish the work. If you are interested in helping to finish it, please contact me. If you must have a Motif interface, XRN release 7.00 is available in <ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/xrn/unsupported/xrn-motif.tgz>. However, release 7.00 is unspported, and I will reject any bug reports or enhancement requests pertaining to it. I do not recommend that you use XRN 7.00. Compiling and installing XRN The following steps are necessary in order to compile and install XRN. The last few steps are the standard method for compiling and installing an X program; if you need more help with them, you should look for it at your site. 1. Check if there is a README.* file for the platform you are trying to compile on, and if so, read it. 2. Edit the Imakefile (after making it writeable with chmod) for your local configuration. The comments in the file explain what needs to be edited. Pay particular attention to "INN", which enables and support for InterNetNews (INN). 3. Edit config.h (after making it writeable with chmod) for your local configuration. The file is (sort of) arranged from most significant to least significant parameters, so if you get part-way through it and start to feel like you can just leave the rest as-is, you probably can. If you don't define a parameter that needs to be defined, you'll get an error during compilation. Make sure to delete the "#error" line near the top of config.h when you're done editing it for your local configuration. That line is there to prevent you from trying to compile the program without configuring it first. Do NOT define OV_CAMBRIDGE when compiling the program -- I use that symbol for my local configuration so that I can ship the same config.h as the one I use, so if you define it, you'll end up getting the configuration that I use locally (which is certainly not what you want). If you want to put all of your configuration paramaters in the SITE_DEFINES variable in the Imakefile, you can do that instead of editing config.h. However, if you do that, make sure to put "-DCONFIG_H_IS_OK" in SITE_DEFINES. 4. Run "xmkmf" and then "make". If you don't have xmkmf at your site, or if it doesn't work or produces a Makefile that doesn't work, you can try configuring by hand, by editing the Makefile included in the distribution (note that if you ran xmkmf, it probably renamed the distributed Makefile to Makefile.bak). It's generated using xmkmf at my site, and almost certainly will require editing to be correct for yours. If you have to do this and you have trouble, please get help from someone at your site rather than contacting me about it; I don't have time to support sites that don't have xmkmf installed properly. If you get an error about a missing header file "mesg_strings.h" when you run "make", then run "make mesg_strings.h" and then run "make" again. 5. Run "make install" to install the program and its application defaults file, and/or "make install.man" to install the man page. Note that XRN will not run correctly without its application defaults file installed. If you have problems... If you have problems compiling or running XRN, you should check the COMMON-PROBLMS file in the XRN distribution to see if your problem is documented there. If not, write to bug-xrn@kamens.brookline.ma.us for assistance. If you write to me about a problem which is documented in COMMON-PROBLMS, and I do not see any sign that you have read it, then I *will* response tersely, telling you to read it before contacting me. In short, please don't waste my time asking me how to solve problems whose solutions are already documented. The XRN mailing list If you would like to be informed of new releases of XRN and of any major bugs that are discovered in between releases, you can subscribe to the xrn-users@kamens.brookline.ma.us mailing list. It's an announcement list, not a discussion list, so the traffic on it is very low. Send mail to xrn-users-request@kamens.brookline.ma.us to ask to be added to the list. The future of XRN Release 9.00 of XRN is the first general-availability release in over a year and a half. The next major release may take just as long, or even longer. I have not had as much time as I would have liked to work on XRN, and I will probably have even less in the future. However, I do not want XRN to be orphaned or to deteriorate. Therefore, I will continue to make bug-fix releases as necessary, and I will devote as much time as I can to making enhancements. If you are interested in volunteering to take over, I'd love to hear from you, but I'm only going to hand off XRN to someone whom I'm convinced will do a good job, because I've invested a lot of effort into it, and because the folks who maintained it before me allowed it to stagnate for years; I do not want that to happen again. I hope you find XRN useful! Jonathan Kamens jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us # $Id: README,v 1.50 1999/09/24 16:42:44 jik Exp $
