Trying to Install CNews on 2.11BSD

Here are my notes on doing this. I've got the software compiled but one of the steps that check correctness is failing.

Getting the Source

I'm using this version of CNews. Here are my changes, cnews_changes.tar which I have applied to get a couple of files to compile, and to fix the makefiles.

Building the Source

Use ftp or some other mechanism to fetch the CNews source and my changes.tar to your 2.11BSD system. I put them in /usr/local/src.

Make a user called news with uid 90, and a group called news with gid 90.

Below when you see Unix command prompts, any that start with # are performed by root, and any that start with $ are performed by news. It helps to have a terminal with root logged in as well as a separate terminal with news logged in.

Setup the build area:

# mkdir /usr/local/src/cnews; chown news.news /usr/local/src/cnews

As news:

$ cd /usr/local/src/cnews
$ tar vxf ../c-news.tar
$ tar vxf ../changes.tar

$ ./quiz
...
Do you want to use your previous answers as defaults [no]? yes
...
      # Hit Enter for all questions
...
done

$ make
      # Let this fail
$ ./fixmakefiles
$ make

Each time the make dies with a Make: Cannot load ../conf/update.ran. Stop. message, just run make again. Once this completes successfully:

# mkdir -p /usr/spool/news /usr/libexec/news /usr/lib/news /usr/lib/news/bin
# chown news.news /usr/spool/news /usr/libexec/news /usr/lib/news /usr/lib/news/bin

$ make install

$ make setup
        # This fails, so I did this
$ cd conf
$ make setup
        # Still fails
$ ./histsetup
$ /usr/libexec/news/maint/adddirs
$ make setup
        # Now works
$ cd ..
$ make setup

As root, setup a few more things:

# umask 022
# make ui
# make readpostcheck
# chmod 6755 /usr/libexec/news/input/newsspool
# mkdir -p /var/spool/uucp
# chmod 755 /usr/local/*news*     # Probably don't need this as umask 022

As news, edit the files that hold your machine's domain name:

$ cd /usr/lib/news
$ vi mailname whoami

As news, go back to the build directory and attempt to confirm that it all got built and installed correctly:

$ cd /usr/local/src/cnews
$ make cmp
  ...
/usr/libexec/news/maint/checkactive -q
/usr/libexec/news/maint/checkactive: 27619 Memory fault - core dumped
/usr/libexec/news/maint/checkactive: 27625 Memory fault - core dumped

This fails. It looks like something in the checkactive shell script is dying. I can't pinpoint it but it's either awk or sort failing.