This is an item to complain about things that ought to be on this
system (but aren't).

Things I can think of, off-hand.

        watch
        bday

        rz,sz, etc. -- all those things remmers put on M-net

        kermit

60 responses total.

elm

mailchk

What, exactly, does "mailchk" do?  There are some 4.2bsd utilities
that do similar sorts of things -- "biff" seems to be the most
similiar, that I can think of...

Ok.  It's not that I have to have mailchk per se, I'd just like *something*
that would let you know that you have new mail.
.]

I uploaded rz and sz and am compiling them as I type.  They'll give x/y/zmodem
upload & download capability.

I can bring the latest ckermit over from emunix.  It's a very new and much
expanded version that has 2K packets, sliding windows, a macro language, and
other goodies. (It's also rather large, not surprisingly.)

'mailchk' is a program I wrote that tells you what mail you've got sitting in
your unread mail file  -- similar to the directory that comes up when you run
Berkeley mail, but much smaller that Berkeley mail.  I find it useful in
conjunction with' tail' to see if I have any new mail messages.  It doesn't
notify you synchronously of new mail arrival; but we seem to have 'biff' here
for that.

I've also got Unix versions of arc, zoo, and unzip that might be handy to have
around.  I'll upload and install them.

We need 'elm'.

We need the latest 'nethack'.  Not sure where to get it.

We need a working emacs.  'Jove' seems to be here, but when I ran it, it gave
me an error message and quit; haven't investigated this.  GNU Emacs would be
nice, but its resource requirements might be excessive.

Gnu C would be nice to have too, being an ANSI compiler & all.  I can bring
that over from emunix and work on installing it also.

        Biff is correct. I asked Kite about biff at one point, way back when...

The copy of jove here (along with virtually everything else, for space &
time reasons) was compiled under 1.1 - there's probably something about
3.5 that it just doesn't like.  Once we get more disk space, we should
be able to compile a more up to date version.

I have source to some version of elm (probably what's running
on M-net.)  Probably best to wait until we have space, again...

Nethack seems to be ftp'able from several hosts -- "jyu.fi = 128.214.7.5"
and more, although my information may be out of date.  Certainly
seems doable.  I also have a binary of 'rogue' here, although I think
it's an old version.

Flex and Bison  (the GNU Lex and Yacc). Gas (the Gnu assembler).
And Gnu Emacs (resources allowing), for those of us who
like to program in Lisp.  Besides, then you can include Emacs
in the list of optional login shells.

It would be nice to have a copy of Moria, too. Or maybe MUD :)

The file
        /usr/mdw/,take4
contains my current copy of what we are missing, which I think includes
everything mentioned in this item thus far.  People might want to look
and speak up if they can supply any of those pieces.

It just occured to me I don't have jan's write pgm on it (I think) --
Jan seems quite interested in getting an updated copy to us with (I
think) the changes to let it live with an unmodified version of login.
We need to think about 'mesg d' though.

Patch, for applying patches to sources and such.

The C version of "shar", which includes things such as "safe unshar"
(i.e., it won't execute things like "rm -rf /" that it finds in the
shar file) and a "smart unshar" that automatically strips off the
header and footer, and then unshars the archive.

The "less" pager.

I got nethack from jyu.fi; it's sitting on my home pc right now.
1.3 MB in compressed form -- too big to install until we have
another disk.

I'll be happy to install the GNU stuff.  If source isn't currently
on emunix I can ftp it easily from prep.ai.mit.edu.  I've installed
much of it on emunix and so am familiar with the procedures.

I suspect GNU Emacs will be too much of a resource hog.  But I could
get Jove and install that.

For LISP programmers, I could get xlisp, a PD Lisp with object
oriented features.

I can bring over the latest elm, but I'd prefer that somebody with
more knowledge of the intricacies of mail setups install it and other
mail-related stuff.  Marc?

(I can install mailchk, of course.)

Sure, I'll install Elm -- just stick it somewhere on here, and let me know
where it is.

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I am currently running "catman -w" which will create
a "/usr/man/whatis" database, which will allow whatis
to run.  Once we have more space, we should probably run
"catman" again & store preformatted pages of everything.

Some people will want to do weird stuff to store compressed
versions of stuff, & delete the nroff source.  I think that would
be an excellent way for Grex to lose the nroff source -- as
has undoubtedly already happened to M-net.  Disk is
getting cheap enough that I'd really like to see us
spend just a bit of it to keep stuff like PD source,
man pages, & such online instead of archiving it,
and then never having it around.

(It seems to be done -- a "whatis" just worked for me.)

   Marcus, I agree about keeping source around.  If we all decide
we don't really have the diskspace for that, we should at least
keep a note around with address of the net archive that the sourc
came from.

How about keeping source to PD stuff in /usr/local/src in
some uniform format, like 16-bit compressed tar archives?

Hmmm...  Why don't I just go create this directory and put
the source for the things I've compiled in there?

...done!

The termcap file here seems to be a bit deficient.  No descriptions
for vt102, vt220, or vt320, for instance.  Any objections if I
import some termcaps from other systems (e.g. emunix) and install
them?

Please do, John, as long as space limitations allow.

Only thing you might want to think about is distinguishing between
ours & suns.  As long as you're about it, I have some aa60 defs...

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Being a vain sort, I will clearly identify any termcaps that I install
as mine.
;.

   Might I make the suggstion that we import the M-Net version of termcap?
Its gotten a lot of funky entries over the years; I'd hate to see it go to
waste.

I've downloaded M-Net's termcap file to my pc.  There are a number of
entries in it worth bringing over, I think.

I ftp'd ckermit source to emunix from uunet.  It's over 3 mb in
compressed form, a bit too large to install here until we have
more disk.  In the meantime, I'll try to find a small Unix kermit
for temporary use.

I could either uucp the binary to the kermit I had copied over
here before (probably an old version of Ckermit), or I could uucp
over the source to a complete kermit in 973 lines or 32K of C src.
That version of kermit dates from 1983!

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Which version?  The very small C version?, or the larger bin?

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I have to get on the stick and set up those confs.  Thanks for the
reminder.

   Is there a 'laston' command?  I haven't found one.  Also where is
the su log hiding?

I guess there isn't a "laston", but one could be gotten going pretty
fast.  "f -m user" gives you "laston" info.  Actually, now that I
think about it, "laston" is probably something Jan put on M-net.

There is no "sulog" as such.  But if you look in the directory
/usr/spool/log, you'll find "syslog.X" files, updated daily, that
have all of the su stuff.  It's also logged on the system console--we
might want to consider if that's being obnoxious or not.

   Considering how often people are going to be at the console, I
don't think so.

   I think a laston would be kinda nice.

   What about newmail?  I liked that a lot on M-Net.

I believe newmail is part of Elm, although it may have been added after
the version we have here was released.

Kermit 4E(072) is about 1MB; Kermit 5A is undoubtedly bigger.  Since
Kermit 5A is still in beta-testing, it might be a good idea to get
4E(072) for now.

I installed cops in /usr/mju/cops.  The output from a test run I
did is in /usr/mju/cops/grex/1991_Jul_5.  There are a bunch of things
that need to be fixed before we go public.

Less v1.77, patch v2.0.12u3, and unzip v4.01 have all been installed.

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As unzip v4.01 supersedes the unzip v3.10 that I installed, the
source unzip.tar.Z in /usr/local/bin should be replaced with the
source for 4.01.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss