For those who have been working closely with me on this, I apologize
for the delays. I only recently obtained the source-code baseline for
auto-faq in May and had been thoroughly entangled in other
obligations, including 7 weeks of summer-school :-(.
The auto-faq software package, originally written and formerly
maintained by Ian Kluft (ikluft@thunder.sbay.org), is now maintained
by me. Ian has been a strong contributor to the net, with his
creation of auto-faq, his past maintenance of amateur-radio-related
FAQ articles, and his current participation with the Usenet Volunteer
Votetakers and Newsgroup Mentors. Like many qualified people with a
full plate (Ian also works a full-time job at Amdahl), he found it
difficult to do justice to all of these projects and understandably
wanted to spin some of them off to qualified and interested volunteers.
Since I was most closely involved in the development and testing of
auto-faq, I asked Ian if I could take over this worthwhile package and
he readily agreed. I don't necessarily have oodles of time either,
but thought I could do some reasonable justice to its maintenance,
particularly with some significant technical support from a local
Internet service provider (run by several UNO classmates of mine).
The following text is the welcome message to new subscribers to the
auto-faq-users@novia.net mailing list and should provide a good
overview of what auto-faq is, how to obtain it, how to obtain support
and hand-holding for it, and how to subscribe to the auto-faq-users
mailing list.
---- begin welcome message ----
Welcome to the auto-faq-users@novia.net mailing list!
If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list,
you can send mail to "Majordomo@oasis.novia.net" with the following command
in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe auto-faq-users "Paul W. Schleck" <pschleck>
Here's the general information for the list you've
subscribed to, in case you don't already have it:
The purpose of the mailing list is to provide a forum for release
announcements, bug-fixes, as well as various hints and tricks regarding
how to use the auto-faq software package. It is an unmoderated, public
mailing list and almost all reasonable discussion about auto-faq is
welcome.
The auto-faq script, written in Perl, was made to help posting
Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ) articles to UseNet newsgroups. It also
helps with cross-posting FAQs to the *.answers newsgroups, if the FAQ
author chooses to do so, by complying with all the formatting
requirements automatically. It was originally written by Ian Kluft
(ikluft@thunder.sbay.org) in early 1992 to manage the posting of the FAQ
documents for rec.radio.cb and rec.radio.amateur.misc. It is currently
maintained by Paul W. Schleck (auto-faq-maint@novia.net) who has worked
with Ian on testing and user support since at least Version 2.4. The
current version is 3.2pl1.
The latest copy of auto-faq may be obtained via anonymous FTP from:
ftp.novia.net:/customers/pschleck/auto-faq/
Consult the INDEX file in that directory for the filename of the latest
release.
For users without FTP access, the package may be obtained via ftpmail:
Send a mail message to ftpmail@ftp.novia.net with the body of:
open
uuencode
get /customers/pschleck/auto-faq/auto-faq32pl1.part1.gz
get /customers/pschleck/auto-faq/auto-faq32pl1.part2.gz
get /customers/pschleck/auto-faq/auto-faq32pl1.part3.gz
To subscribe/unsubscribe to this list, send an E-mail message to
auto-faq-users-request@novia.net and put in the body of the message:
subscribe auto-faq-users
or
unsubscribe auto-faq-users
as appropriate. Remember that auto-faq-users-request is not read by
a human. Rather, messages sent to that address are automatically
processed by the majordomo server that manages this mailing list.
Actual discussion articles for the mailing list should be sent to
auto-faq-users@novia.net, which are then relayed to all subscribers.
Just about any discussion related to the auto-faq package is welcome.
However, to keep this forum useful to all participants, the following
basic rules apply (and probably apply to other mailing lists in general):
- This list has many subscribers with subscription and unsubscription
requests being submitted frequently. Please direct those requests
to auto-faq-users-request, *NOT* auto-faq-users (which is the
message submission address). While auto-faq-users is not a big
list, this is a good netiquette habit to get into for participating
on mailing lists with much larger audiences. If you have a problem
with the mailing list that cannot be resolved by the -request
address, please direct them to owner-auto-faq-users@novia.net.
- While it's all right to politely disagree with someone (sometimes
vigorously), it's never all right to attack someone personally.
Also, sometimes honest differences of opinion will remain despite
all efforts to win others over to your side. Please try to bring
discussion threads to a close when they honestly don't add any
more information to the debate. The owner of this mailing list
reserves the right to make a determination if a given discussion
thread has reached this state.
- This list exists as a resource to help you, but please make a
reasonable effort to consult the voluminous user documentation that
comes with auto-faq first. In this way, you not only help yourself
become more self-sufficient in the use of Internet software tools, you
also help the maintainers and future users by flushing out errors and
amibiguities in the documentation (and we're sure that there still are
some lurking in there! :-). Please don't hesitate to ask a question
if you have read the documentation and feel that it isn't illuminating
about some obscure feature of auto-faq, though (particularly if you
quote which part of the documentation didn't explain things clearly
enough).
- Some threads of discussion may lean more towards FAQ maintenance in
general. You may wish to consider subscribing to faq-maintainers,
(send E-mail to faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu to subscribe), which
is a mailing list to discuss general FAQ maintenance issues (it is
sponsored by the *.answers moderation team). Since may users of
auto-faq use it to manage the posting of amateur-radio-related FAQ
articles, it seems appropriate to also add a pointer to the
rec.radio.amateur.* Working Group mailing list (send mail to
listproc@theporch.com to subscribe), which is a smaller list dealing
with FAQ maintenance issues specific to rec.radio.amateur.*.
These rules help make this and other mailing lists useful to their
respective audiences. Please take advantage of this and other Internet
resources, but remember that what you get out of them is directly
proportional to what you and others put into them.
(The maintainer would like to thank Dave Rosser, Jr., and the rest of the
staff at Novia Internetworking, for sponsoring this mailing list and
providing technical support for majordomo, anonymous FTP, and ftpmail.)
Thank you for your interest in and support of auto-faq!
-- Paul W. Schleck auto-faq-maint@novia.net owner-auto-faq-users@novia.netauto-faq Maintainer
---- end welcome message ----
Some additional points:
- Although auto-faq 3.2pl1 is billed as a documentation-only patch, sharp-eyed readers will notice in the patch file (auto-faq32-32pl1.diff.gz) that there are source-code differences as well. The reason for this is that Ian sent out several "pre-release" copies of auto-faq to testers and co-developers. I've attempted to base the latest version on the latest contents of Ian's baseline, and reference the patch against the latest "3.2" formerly available at ftp.amdahl.com.
- One patch to the documentation that readers of faq-maintainers and the *.answers moderators might note is a change to the sample.config file. Naive new users who adopted this file's former contents might find themselves accidentally posting unapproved articles to moderated newsgroups (this was a long-standing problem that I am glad to have finally taken care of).
- Although auto-faq has not been tested against Perl 5.0, it hasn't necessarily not worked, either (at the very least, no one has complained). If anyone would be interested in doing some Perl 5.0 compatibility testing for auto-faq, please contact me.
- I'd like an additional person to man the auto-faq-help@novia.net E-mail help desk. With Ian as the primary maintainer, I was his backup. I now need a backup for me.
- I'd like to explore a Verson 3.3 before the summer is out. It would include any necessary Perl 5.0 porting (assuming porting is needed and is not too much of a mess) plus any small features that users feel are missing.
- Far off in the future (say, Summer of 1996), I might be interested in undertaking a Version 4.0 with major enhancements including seamless handling of HTML files, Perl 5.0 constructs, more automated installation and setup of configuration files, post_faq.pl compatibility/migration path, etc. The odds of this occurring are directly proportional to users making good technical suggestions (and possibly contributing code). The auto-faq-users mailing list would be an excellent forum for coordinating this.
Again, I'd like to thank Ian Kluft for his excellent contributions to the net as well as the staff of Novia Internetworking in Omaha, Nebraska for helping to make this transition, and continued support for auto-faq, possible.
-- Paul W. Schleck auto-faq-maint@novia.netauto-faq Maintainer
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