HyperNews Distribution

Now available is hypernews1.9B5.7.tar.gz, the beta 5.7 release of 1.9. You can also now get it via ftp: hypernews1.9B5.7.tar.gz

The distribution includes the documents that correspond to that version. Let us know about problems with this beta release.

Please subscribe to the history page so you will be notified when new releases occur. Please do this if you install a beta version.

There is a HyperNews Test page to which you may add miscellaneous tests. If you find any bugs, please report them to the bugs page or if they occur during installation, to the installation page.

If you improve the HyperNews code, by all means let me know so I can pass your changes on to others.

If any of your hypernews pages will be readable by the public, I'd like to include a reference to them from the HyperNews Home Page.

At this time, no licensing is required of HyperNews for any use, free or not, or for free distribution. If you are interested in selling HyperNews as is or with your own improvements, contact me.

If you want to install HyperNews for others, feel free to advertise your service in the responses to this page.

Compatibility

HyperNews should work with the standard CGI support provided by most http servers; it is known to work with NCSA's httpd (get 1.5), CERN's httpd, Apache, Netsite, and Plexus.

No port to NT, Windows, or Mac has been completed, that I know of.

The internal security mechanism of NCSA's or CERN's httpd is used, and this same mechanism is not used with other servers, so you will have to either do some work to make the internal security work, or use "manual_security".

If HyperNews is incompatible with the system you want to use, consider one of the other available conferencing systems.

Perl

All the software is entirely written in Perl, but it requires Perl 5. Perl 5.000 and 5.001 appear to have problems - use 5.001m , but not 5.001n. 5.002 is also fine.) HyperNews requires use of eval, and some versions (or ports?) of Perl do not properly support it - I believe we have work arounds for these problems in place.

We are not going to continue to maintain consistency with Perl 4 any longer since there are several features available only in Perl 5 that I would like to start using (i.e. OO features).

Socket.pm in your Perl 5 library is used by http.pl (part of HyperNews distribution) to fetch documents via HTTP. For some operating systems, Socket.pm has problems, so you might want to try socket.ph instead. To do so, you'll need to translate the /usr/include files (using "cd /usr/include; h2ph * sys/*"), or at least translate sys/socket.h and whatever it requires. If sys/socket.ph exists but is not found by Perl, it could be a problem with your Perl installation. If execution errors result when sys/socket.ph is loaded via http.pl, this is not surprising. I recommend you just comment out the offending lines in sys/socket.ph or in one of the files it loads.

Disk Requirements

Frequently, people ask what the disk requirements for HyperNews are. The source (which is what you run) takes less than 1 M. Each article or response takes the size of the article or response itself plus the overhead of the urc file (about 2K), a directory, if there are any subresponses, a list of all the subresponses, and a mailing list of subscribers. The mailing list is typically small or non-existent, except for at the base article level. The list has one line per subscriber.

What Next?

After downloading the source, you need to install it.

Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)

Last modified: Tue May 21 14:33:08 CDT 1996