Re: Debian 1.2 breaks INN, UUCP
> In article <[🔎] 199612200447.WAA04432@complete.org> you wrote:
> The "compress" that was part of early Debian 1.1 releases was actually a link
> to "gzip". This was a bad thing to do, because it broke some applications that
> expected a "compress" program to actually create "compress"'ed files as output,
> namely the X build and some sites who did UUCP'ed news to neighbors who didn't
> have gzip.
Hmm, now this is strange. My newsfeed does not accept gzipped articles. And
everything was working fine while the "compress" program was used. When I
changed the config for INN to use gzip, all my outbound news was broken...
The feed would not unpack it. So I am confused now :-)
> The real "compress" has patent issues or something that cause it to have bad
> karma in the free software (Linux) community. I forget the details.
I understand that, and I am against the Unisys patent enforcement as well.
However, they have stated that they will only try to enforece the patent on
people that are making money from it, thus effectively making it legal to
distribute compress in the "non-free" section of Debian.
>
> : This deletion was made WITHOUT WARNING to me.
>
> The change was a bug fix. It got a bunch of discussion in debian-devel on a
> couple of occasions in the last year.
This was the thing that irked me -- that there was no warning that compress
was being deleted. I unfortunately have not been on debian-devel for a
significant amount of time (and there is so much traffic here that I can't
read every message in detail anyway), so I did not see that one.
> You were really lucky that the "compress" link to gzip worked for you at all.
> It suggests that your neighbors were using the "uncompress" that is a link to
> gunzip, as is still provided in Debian. If they had really been using compress
> you would have been hosed long ago.
Hmmm, what you say makes sense, and they really are using normal "compress",
but yet it worked. Something here is not correct, but I don't know what it is
:-(
>
> : But Debian's send-uucp program ignores /etc/news/send-uucp.cf.
>
> I can't help here. Sounds like a legitimate bug that should be reported in
> the package that provides send-uucp... inn?
OK, I'll submit a bug report for the inn package.
> clarify what happened, and encourages you to understand that the changes you've
> made are absolutely the right things to have done.
Yes, thank you for explaining it. I am still a bit puzzled. I have found a temporary workaround (not compressing news batches at all), but I still think that whatever package was responsible for the deletion of compress should have issued a warning that the program was being deleted (or offered to let the user keep it around).
Does gzip act as "compress" did when it is invoked as "compress"? Perhaps that is a possibility, I don't know....
Thanks for your time,
John Goerzen
--
John Goerzen | System administrator & owner, The Communications
Custom programming | Centre and Complete Network (complete.org)
jgoerzen@complete.org | Free Unix shell access, 316-367-8490 w/ your modem.
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