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Date:Mon Dec 29 11:23:21 2000 
Subject:Re: ved_gn 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1001229.02 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

Hi Luc (Luc Beaudoin <use_lucb@telus.net>):

> Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 06:14:58 GMT
>
> Greetings all,
>
> I finally have poplog running on my own PC under linux!

Congratulations. If you had problems, suggestions for improving
installation instructions, etc. please post them.

If you are interested, there are various extensions and tailorings
available from Birmingham, in this file (about 8.4 Mbytes)

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popextras.tar

It includes our local ved-based news reader (latest version of ved_gn,
see below), as well as various other things here used by researchers and
students and all the main AI teach files, rclib, poprulebase, sim_agent,
and much improved versions of Ved's mail reading tools ved_send
(requires sendmail), ved_reply, ved_Reply, ved_respond, ved_Respond,
ved_getmail etc. It also includes the Poplog contrib directory and David
Young's popvision library, which together take up half the space. Maybe
I should produce a min-iextras.tar file without them?

> Does anyone know how I could view the source for ved_gn.p
>     ENTER showlib ved_gn
> says that it has moved to the public library (in 1990!).

If this is what you see

|     uses ved_net;
|
|     /* --- Revision History ---------------------------------------------------
|     --- Aaron Sloman, Mar 20 1990
| 	    Transferred to Public Poplog Library
|      */

Then what you have is a file that's part of the `standard' Poplog
distribution (from Sussex and ISL) as it was when frozen in mid 1999.
When you compile that file it compiles LIB ved_net

The ved_net library includes an old version of ved_gn which you can
examine if you do SHOWLIB VED_NET

However that version of ved_gn assumed that news files were
cross-mounted on your local machine in /usr/spool/news
(via NFS).

So it will not work with a remote news server using the NNTP
protocol. I suspect nobody has used it for years.

The new version of ved_gn, in use in Birmingham (and tested at sussex,
though I don't know if anyone uses it there), works with NNTP and
is implemented using the socket library (REF SOCKETS) installed in
1995. So it respects the $NNTPSERVER environment variable, etc.

If you wish to fetch only the Birmingham news extensions, without
all of popextras.tar, then you can get this 52 KB file

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/vedgn.tar.gz

which you can untar in $poplocal/local. It provides these files:

Library files (size, date, time, filename):

      354 1992-08-19 09:09 auto/gn.p
            top level command for invoking ved_gn outside the editor

    49477 1998-11-02 08:41 auto/ved_gn.p
            the main news reading utility

     1589 2000-01-16 22:54 auto/ved_gnserver.p
            can be used to alter the current news server while in Ved
            You'll have to edit the list ved_gnserver_abbreviations
            if you want to use abbreviations for frequently used
            servers.

     4787 1996-10-20 10:22 auto/ved_gn_setup.p
            Can be used to interrogate the current list of active
            news groups on your news server, and set up your .newsrc
            file. There are instructions at the top of the library
            file.

     7195 1998-10-19 23:43 auto/ved_followup.p
            Used for preparing a followup message to the news group
            (to be posted using ved_postnews) or a reply to sender
            (to be posted using ved_send)
            This was used to prepare the header for this message, and
            to indent your original message.

    12568 1996-10-20 09:07 auto/ved_postnews.p
            For posting news messages. Requires "inews" to be
            running on your machine. (I should change it to use
            the NNTP "post" option, which I did not bother to
            do because we already have inews and the current version
            of ved_postnews works here. The protocol is quite simple, so
            it should take at most an hour or two, including testing.)

DOCUMENTATION FILES
    42996 1997-05-28 01:11 help/ved_gn
     6791 1996-11-29 18:08 help/ved_postnews

The last two documentation files can be browsed in this directory
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/help/


I would like to add all of these things, and various other upgrades
(e.g. the "!" pattern prefix that allows lvars variables to be used
in patterns with the pop-11 pattern matcher) to the standard distrib
Poplog distributions but I have been (a) too busy, (b) wary about
doing this without extensive consultation.

I was hoping to set up a project to look after the poplog system,
but have been swamped by too many other things to get to the stage of
applying for funding.

Maybe if I firmly say No to everything else for a few months I'll be
able to clear the backlog!

Aaron
===
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html