Here's what I've found so far:
(1) It compiles. That's a nice touch, I thought. I did have to include
<ctype.h> in fill.c, but other than that it built right away. The
copy that I've made available does not have that change implemented.
(2) The makefile needed a little help in for "make shar" to work. I went
ahead and did that.
(3) It spits out rather nicely formatted netnews articles, but it doesn't
categorize them as deeply as the X*Press PC software that I have.
For example, all Weather articles are put into "xpress.weather"
and not "xpress.weather.<locale>". Likewise for things like
"xpress.sports" instead of "xpress.sports.headlines" et al.
I haven't looked to see why that might be. It may have simply
been the author's preference.
(4) Some articles have "x"'s instead of spaces. Haven't looked into why.
(5) It's interface to the netnews system itself is pretty crude. It builds
up a news batch in a file called "news", and then periodically renames
the file "news.N" where N keeps getting incremented each time. Another
program (a shell script, provided) comes along and scoops them up and
feeds them into rnews. Lots of easy improvements could be made here.
(6) I haven't quite figured out *what* it does with the stock quotes.
They seem to be getting recognized, but I am not sure where they
are going just yet.
(7) Beware of your disk space limitations before you run this all night.
A 20 minute run produced roughly 10 articles per minute at about
1.5KB per article. Of course, duplicates should get rejected
somewhere along the way and so one wouldn't expect that rate
all day long, but still...
(8) Don't forget to create the xpress.* newsgroups on your system and
add the "xpress" distribution to your local sys file entry.
(9) Oh yeah, to run the thing, compile it and then feed the datastream
into its stdin. It spits out interesting logfile stuff on stderr.
If you're interested in getting a copy for yourself, send a request to
the archive server xpress-archive@csd.mot.com with the following message
body:
send src/xx.01
send src/xx.02
It's a two-part shar archive.
Have fun, and please report results/fixes/enhancements/revelations/whatever.
And if someone would truly like to *own* this code and merge people's
changes into one nice package, please let me know.
--
-Brian Smithson
Motorola Inc., Computer Group, Commercial Systems Division
10700 N. De Anza Boulevard, Cupertino, CA 95014 USA, (408)366-4104
brian@csd.mot.com, {apple | pyramid}!motcsd!brian