Gup, the Group Update Program is a Unix mail-server that lets a remote
site change their newsgroups subscription without requiring the
intervention of the news administrator at the feed site.

Gup is suited to news administrators that find they are spending an
inordinate amount of time editing the INN newsfeeds file (or the
C-News sys file) on behalf of the remote sites.

Once installed, the news administrator at the remote sites simply
mails commands to gup to make changes to their own site's subscription
list.  Not only is no intervention required at the feed site, but gup
checks the requests for valid newsgroup names, patterns that have no
effect and so on, giving the requester precise information about the
effect of their subscription.

Each site has to be configured with gup before they can gain access.
Configuration information includes a password and the administrator's
mail ID as the results of any gup requests are mailed back to the
configured administrator.

Gup has no knowledge of any particular news system. Instead it
maintains individual files for each site. A separate shell script is
used to construct the *real* subscription file (we have provided a
sample script for INN). The advantage of this strategy is that gup can
be used with any news system, B-News, C-News, INN or whatever.


Gup is definitely experimental software. While it has been used for a
short while at two of the main newsfeed sites within .apana.org.au
with some success, it is by no means perfect or complete. The purpose
of posting to alt.sources is to give it more widespread use and get
some feedback in terms of development directions.

The other reason for posting here is to find out just how non-portable
gup is. We admit we haven't tried very hard in this area yet. In fact
gup is only known to run on SunOS and NetBSD - sorry. Having said that
the frame-work is in place for portability considerations and given
the minimal amount of system interaction, gup should be able to
compile and run on most decent Unix systems with minimal work.


So, give it a blast and tell us what you think.


Mark Delany <markd@bushwire.apana.org.au>
Andrew Herbert <andrew@werple.apana.org.au>


Acknowledgements
----------------

Thanks to the APANA crowd for being the guinea-pigs that got to use
Gup first and have the priviledge of finding a few bugs for us.

We snarfled wildmat.c from the INN sources and the rfc822.* parsing
routines from the newsgate sources. Thanks to Rich Salz
<rsalz@osf.org> who write both of these packages.

--------------------
