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. --------------------