This README is for the Amiga port of Henry Spencer's and Geoff Collyer's
CNews news distribution package.

Do not expect this file to tell you how CNews works.  There is documentation
which comes with CNews that will describe that for you (see doc/install.doc
for general information, other files in doc/ for more info).

Instead, this file contains installation instructions for the Amiga.  This
begins by understanding (at a very high level) what CNews does.

	1.	News comes into our machine from the feeder site.  Normally such
		news will be compressed using the Unix compress(1) program, although
		uncompressed news will be handled correctly also.

	2.	When the news arrives, UUX will execute RNEWS and provide the given
		batch of news as stdin.  RNEWS will simply move the file to another
		location, NEWSARTS:In.coming (which is a directory).

		NB:  whatever transport mechanism you're using should file the
		article in that directory.

	3.	At periodic intervals, each file in NEWSARTS/In.coming (hereafter
		referred to as "in.coming") will be uncompressed and unbatched.
		Uncompression *may* use the "acomp" program provided with this
		distribution, or any other compress(1) compatible program.  Acomp
		has been optimized for 68020/68030 operation, and will take
		advantage of the bit-field instructions that those processors have.
		Otherwise, the bit-fields are handled in 68000/68010 code.  Also,
		this code dynamically allocates its buffers, meaning that two large
		hunks are allocated instead of one, reducing the requirement
		(somewhat) for contiguous memory.  Only memory required is
		allocated.

		NB:  the periodic intervals can be via AmiCron or manually.

	4.	After uncompression, the articles are ready to be dispersed for
		filed prior to reading.  This is the job of RELAYNEWS.  It reads
		the incoming news and creates directories and files as needed
		based on the "Newsgroups:" header of the article.  Full handling
		of the "active" file is implemented, i.e. "junk" articles, "to."
		newsgroups, "control" newsgroup, moderated newsgroups, etc.

		Local news also goes into RELAYNEWS, which files the article, just
		like normal, and then puts it into a queue file for transmission
		to your feeder site.  See the section below, "Non-Leaf Sites".

	5.	Read your news.  I have provided AmiRN for this.  Since I don't have
		and have never used `rn', I have no idea how close this program
		comes to the "Real Thing (tm)".

	6.	Run the EXPIRE program, which removes old articles in order to
		make room for more.  I typically run EXPIRE on a daily basis, but
		I am able to read the news at least that often also.  Occasionally,
		when I'm out-of-town, the news gets to my machine, but I don't let
		it unbatch until I get home.  Initially this was done out of
		paranoia; now its that way because I just haven't changed it! ;-)

		NB:  EXPIRE contains code to perform an archive operation instead
		of a removal.  This hasn't (yet) been tested on an Amiga.  However,
		I felt that what *is* provided by this CNews release would more than
		make up for it.

	7.	That's All Folks!!!


Non-Leaf Sites.

	If you are going to be sending news to another site, i.e. you are not
	a "leaf" or "terminating" site, or you plan on posting your own news
	articles, there's a little more work involved.

	1.	As news comes in your "sys" file will be checked to see if that
		news should be propagated to other sites.  If so, a file will be
		appended to which is a list of full pathnames to the articles
		that need to be sent.  There will be one such file per destination
		machine.

		It is also possible that instead of "batch"ing news, each article
		is transmitted as a mail message to your feeder site.  Which one
		you choose will be reflected by option flags in the "sys" file.

	2.	Periodically you must run the BATCHER program to read those files,
		concatenate the articles together (before they are EXPIRE'd! :-),
		compress them, and send them on their way to the next site.