Newshound and Eternal September

Very roughly at teatime today, I stopped being able to post to newsgroups using Newshound. Eternal September port 8119 (which used to allow me to post) appears to no longer be open; port 119 allows me to read but not to post, because Newshound doesn’t issue AUTHINFO commands.

Joseph Heenan quit the RISC OS world some years ago. I just tried looking for source, probably very inexpertly, and couldn’t access any – though I could see a diff with Steve Fryatt’s name on it.

The principle of adding AUTHINFO commands to Newshound doesn’t frighten me (I have some experience with POP3, albeit some years ago now), but I’d need a full set of source files. Or would someone else prefer to have a go?

Joseph Heenan quit the RISC OS world some years ago. I just tried looking for source, probably very inexpertly, and couldn’t access any – though I could see a diff with Steve Fryatt’s name on it.

The latest source is in SourceForge, I think. I used to have commit access, and probably still do. I stopped any work on it when one of the more delightful members of our community started to harass me about the Choices code — which I’d never touched, let alone made changes to the functionality of.

Assuming that I still have access to the repo, I would be happy to check the source out if you can’t do it and to commit changes back. I’m not sure that I can give anyone else access.

Code licence might be a fun issue, though. It’s not open, although I do have permission from Joseph to distribute updated versions.

Scrub that — it says BSD on the repository, but not inside the archive. Hmm.

Oh, and it’s all in a CVS repository. I would be half tempted to consider moving it to somewhere like GitHub, where it’s at least in a usable VCS.

I suspect there may be some corruption in the SourceForge archive. I installed cvs on my Ubuntu box and attempted to get the source using the command line given on the site (copy and paste). The checkout stalled in newshound/!Newshound/h/realtime and eventually gave an error message:

cvs [checkout aborted]; end of file from server (consult above messages if any)

I deleted the contents of the newly created newshound directory and repeated the process, which failed at the same point in the same way.

Steve, I’d be grateful if you would try and see if you have any more success than me. If you don’t, then I guess the only hope is if you or someone else has a copy of the source that you/they can pass on. The BSD licence would appear to permit that.

Does anyone recognise wimpclib:o.wimpc32?

I can’t even think what a more up-to-date equivalent might be.

SourceForge CVS link says

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@a.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/riscosnet co -P wimpclib

so I would guess it is a 32bit compilation of the above project.

I am sure I checked out all of the projects via CVS some time ago, so they are (probably) lurking in one of my “unsorted” Eclipse workspaces somewhere.

I deleted the contents of the newly created newshound directory and repeated the process, which failed at the same point in the same way.

It’s just worked fine for me, and I have now the NewsHound and WimpCLib projects on my hard disc.

ETA: But it has failed whilst checking out the WebGet project. Perhaps SourceForge are having issues at the moment?

so I would guess it is a 32bit compilation of the above project.

The Make32 file in that project targets o.wimpc32, so does seem likely. :)

Yes, NewsHound 142 and PopStar in there too was done for the Iyonix era machines.
If Steve remembers doing that he’s thinking back a fair time.

If Steve remembers doing that he’s thinking back a fair time.

Around 2010 or so, from the emails. I even found the lovely one about Choices, which reminded me exactly why I’d given up on doing any more work on NewsHound. :(

I would be half tempted to consider moving it to somewhere like GitHub, where it’s at least in a usable VCS.

It seems that a Git conversion would be required anyway, as these days CVS is read only on SourceForge. I’ll investigate further, as an attempt to dump the CVS data using RSync has hit the same timeout problem.

Around 2010 or so, from the emails. I even found the lovely one about Choices, which reminded me exactly why I’d given up on doing any more work on NewsHound. :(

Some things are best left buried. Not NewsHound, the other.

I have wondered whether the news fetch function of NewsHound and the filtering of AntiSpam might make a good match, but then you’d need to build mail send and news send into that too.

I have wondered whether the news fetch function of NewsHound and the filtering of AntiSpam might make a good match, but then you’d need to build mail send and news send into that too.

Mail send is already in AntiSpam. Secure, too.

Steffen: thanks for the pointer to wimpclib. I had my blinkers on. :-(

A quick update: it looks as if I’ve managed to get the full CVS repository data, at least for NewsHound and WimpCLib (the rest should be OK too, but I’ve not checked) and imported it into Git. I’ll double check the licence terms, but assuming it is all BSD, there’s no reason why I can’t put those on to GitHub even if I can’t create Git repos on SourceForge.

It’s been a very long time, and at least one enforced password reset, since I used my SourceForge account…

A quick update: it looks as if I’ve managed to get the full CVS repository data,

Very good! I have found the CVS checkout, but full history is a lot better of course.

Git repositories of NewsHound and WimpCLib are now in the RISC OS Net project on SourceForge; I’ll do the other applications shortly.

They should be cloneable, but I suspect that I’ll need to merge things back in. If you need anything else, Dave, let me know — I seem to be a project admin, so I could probably give you write access too, if that would be any help.

I’ve not checked the conversion much, but there’s very little in there anyway – if there are any issues, let me know. The CVS repo is still available in read only form, if necessary.

Thanks, Steve.

I tried cvs checkout earlier this evening and it worked. Third time lucky. The first two times failed identically as far as I could see, but it must have been a temporary error.

I’ve built WimpCLib too, and I’ve just built NewsHound. The executable seems to work, although I’d collected news not long before (using the old app) so it doesn’t count as much of a test.

Let’s see where we go from here!

I tried cvs checkout earlier this evening and it worked. […] Let’s see where we go from here!

If you want to check the changes back in (or if you want me to do it), you’ll need to be using Git as SourceForce deprecated CVS ages ago and then turned off commits in 2017 – so the CVS repo is now read-only. To save things getting messy later, I’d strongly suggest cloning the Git repos and working from them, not the CVS version.

Once I’m happy the conversion has gone OK, I’ll hide (not delete) the CVS link on the project, so that the Git option is the only one available.

While people are looking at Newshound it would be helpful to me to have an overview of what it does preparing the delivery for Messenger or Pluto.
Currently I use a port of Fetchmail that pipes the standard mail stream to a rmail convertor and leaves it in the expected Maildir.
I noticed there is a linux Newsfetch that sounds like it could do
something similar, maybe it could be converted to rmail and dropped
in an expected place and Messenger/Pluto could do the rest?

If someone updates Newshound that will be appreciated for the short term though.

I believe I’ve reached an understanding of what goes wrong.

Normally a client would open port 119 on the news server, receive a 200 OK response, issue a POST command (in the case that it wants to post a news message), and the server would reply with 480, meaning authentication required. The client would issue AUTHINFO USER and AUTHINFO PASS commands, after which the server would issue 340 Send Article.

Unfortunately the eternal-september server on port 119, on receipt of POST, just issues a 340 response, i.e. it doesn’t ask for authentication. When the article has been sent by the client, the server responds with 441 Posting failed – because the client hasn’t authenticated.

The server that ran on port 8119 used to respond to POST with 480, so the authentication process happened successfully.

There appear to be two ways round it: one is, on receipt of 441, to authenticate and try again. Messy, but this series of steps is what’s in the RFCs. The other is to authenticate immediately on receipt of the 200 OK. This is mentioned in one of the RFCs as an unofficial work-round. Its effect should be to authenticate the entire session.

Hmm, in other words, there’s what the RFC says should be done, and there’s what this server plucked out of its backside? <sigh>

Hmm, in other words, there’s what the RFC says should be done, and there’s what this server plucked out of its backside?

Yes. Not only that, but the two servers they had running until two days ago behaved differently.

On a more promising note, I appear to have managed to make the try-again-on-441 route work with very little change to the code. I need to add something to stop it retrying if authentication fails, and clearly I need to do lots more testing.

The icon bar’s Info window has a web site button, which still points to Joseph Heenan’s site. We could point it at the git repo, which doesn’t help ordinary users much. Maybe it should go in the PlingStore?

R-Comp ship it in the Messenger Pro suite, of course, but they don’t actually own NewsHound, so they don’t have any exclusivity on it.

The icon bar’s Info window has a web site button, which still points to Joseph Heenan’s site. We could point it at the git repo, which doesn’t help ordinary users much.

Joseph’s site points to the SourceForge project, which is where 1.52 can be downloaded as a RISC OS Zip file. This was done so that anyone with admin permissions to the SF project could make new builds available for download, and anyone with the old links could find it.

My feeling is that it would be best left like this, again on the basis that so far, it ain’t broke.

PS. We could always set up a static site on SourceForge, which might be more (RISC OS) user-friendly.

This page would probably be the best home for the downloads from now on (updated, of course).

Maybe it should go in the PlingStore?

That would be sensible. PackMan, too.

Could I suggest that the -32 on the end of the version number is removed, as it is probably no longer relevant, and is likely to be confusing to many?