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Date:      Wed, 3 Jul 1996 02:41:28 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Dmitry Kohmanyuk <dk@dog.farm.org>
To:        freebsd-ports@freensd.org
Subject:   nntpbtr port uploaded
Message-ID:  <199607031551.LAA05142@dog.farm.org>

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I have finished and uploaded a port of nntpbtr, a NNTP bulk transfer
program, to :

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/nntpbtr-1.7-port.tar.gz

For those of you who do not know what nntpbtr is ;-), here it goes:

nntpbtr is a high-performance, crash-resistant, well-buffered
NNTP `suck-in' transfer agent.  It is intended to be used by those
who have either unstable or high-delay (i.e., satellite) links
and want to get their news from a NNTP server at the maximum speed,
without any articles lost or double-transferred.  No intervention
(or even awareness ;-) of remote site is necessary.  You just need
a working NNTP daemon on the server side (INN is best, IMHO).

The author of the program is Leonid Yegoshin <egoshin@ihep.su>, LY22.
Unfortunately, the program comes with README in russian language only,
but the manual page is in English. 

I use it like: 
/usr/local/sbin/nntpbtr -g 'comp.lang.perl.*,comp.security*' news.host.name

(of course, you have to substite real newsgroup pattern (wildmat(8) if
your server uses INN) and news server name here;  also, the installation
presumes nntpbtr program to be run as news id in order to create work
file (see below).  One line of statitics (this is over Telebit 2500
modem in v.32/MNP mode), to give you an idea of performance:

bertrand.ccs.carleton.ca: processed 2139 articles (1753 accepted), 
 2907967 bytes (1264b/sec)


A few notes on the port:

The program itself is relatively well-written and portable;  I would
like to get some feedback on the following things:

- the program wants dbz module (dbz.c) to be available during compilation,
  using the path of ../dbz.  I have grabbed dbz sources from INN distribution,
  placed them under files/dbz.  In pre-build target, I create 
  a hard link to work/dbz, then compile dbz.c there, to avoid writing
  under files/ directory in port.  I do not think it would be better
  to rely on INN's source during compilation.  Anybody objects?

- the patches in patches/ are in unidiff format.  Well, I find it 
  easier to read, and it is compatible with any decent patch program.

- the patch-ab adds `all' and `install' targets to program's Makefile.
  I do not feel like overriding `do-build' and invoke a separate Makefile
  in work/ directory.  Opinions?

- some policy values are in conf.h under WRKSRC.  Specifically, these
  are paths to rnews program and history files (choosen to be
  compatible with FreeBSD INN port - /usr/local/bin/rnews, 
  /usr/local/news/lib/history), as well to directory where nntpbtr creates 
  its work file (with list of articles to be retrieved).  
  It is important that this file would be in persistent place (not /tmp).
  Now, it is /var/spool/news/nntpbtr-HOSTNAME.  There is only one
  file per server.


This is my first port contribution, so I welcome any comments.





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