Packaging an RGTP server and client
There is a bulletin board system at Cambridge University called GROGGS[1].
Since 1995 it has used a TCP protocol called RGTP[2], which also finds
limited use at a few other sites. Various pieces of software related to
RGTP exist. I maintain two of these: "yarrow", a web client for RGTP,
and "spurge", a fairly simple RGTP server. spurge is not the RGTP server
used on GROGGS itself.
It has occasionally been suggested to me that I should package these two.
Before I even consider this, I wondered what people thought about
their general usefulness. Together they provide a bare-bones web bulletin
board system, but there are many others. The existence of a
client-independent protocol is perhaps a small bonus. But it's
not as though there had been a massive take-up of RGTP outside
a few Cambridge people.
(For completeness, I should mention that other RGTP clients have already
been debianised but are not included in Debian's catalogue, notably
greed[3].)
[1] http://www.groggs.group.cam.ac.uk/
[2] http://www.groggs.group.cam.ac.uk/protocol.txt
[3] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/free/GREED.html
Thomas
--
Thomas Thurman, poet and programmer - thomas at thurman.org.uk
My poems, mostly formalist, one each day: http://thomasthurman.org/poem-a-day/
What do you do when a dragon steals your library books? http://borrowable.net
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