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Recreating bulletin

Back in university we used to use a system called BULLETIN on the local VAX/VMS cluster. It eventually went away due to security issues. But I was thinking it might be fun to recreate. First though I'd like an historic git repo that covers the early years.

This repo is not it. It's where I attempt to recreate it.

Who wrote it

First, git commits need an author. It would be nice to figure out the author. The version I used I suspect was written by Mark London.

Where to find BULLETIN

The place to get it seems to be the DECUS archives. I tracked it down with help from Kent Brodie who I discovered via an old USENET post where he too was trying to track the software down. In 1994.

Extracting from tape

To trawl through looking for bulletin source distros (using the zip files from decuslib:

for f in *.zip; do
  unzip -l $f 2> /dev/null | grep -qi /bulletin && echo $f;
done

That yields this list of zip files:

I did this on an internet server since my bandwidth is tiny. I only copied down the relevant bits of the zip files which I extracted like so:

for f in *.zip; do
  unzip -l $f 2> /dev/null | grep -qi /bulletin \
    && unzip $f $(unzip -l $f | grep -i /bulletin | awk '{print $4}');
done
tar jcf decus.tar.bz2 decus

This was used to create decus.tar.bz2 which was then extracted as decus/ in this archive.

Creating the BULLETIN source repo (or branch)

Still trying to decide the end result here. I was going to do a separate source repo but there's a lot of conversion steps I'd like to capture. So the master branch might turn into a decus2git branch and then once the gross conversion steps are done, each tape would get it's own orphan commit branch (with the correct GIT_AUTHOR and commit info metadata). Something like tapes/DECUS_TAPE_NAME. Then the master branch would be created by merging in each tape branch in chronological order.

The BULLETIN git repo is created by a shell script, mkBULLETIN.sh based on edits to the various versions of bulletin that were extracted from the ZIP archives.

The files in the ZIP archives are not ready in their current state to make the repo. A number of things had to be done to get them ready for a proper historical source code archive. The commit logs for this repo cover those steps, but the following sections explain the steps in more detail.

Dependencies

The shell snippets assume zsh (the **/*.ext idiom gets used a lot). Need a gcc toolchain. Need the unzip, unar and zoo utilities.

File conversions

Some files are in VMS record formats. These are handled by convert-vms-record-fmt.c which is compiled to convert-vms-record-fmt.

.mai files

I think these are mail archives. Might need a script to turn those into mbox files.

Unpacking archives.

Within the zip files there are sometimes other archive files. These had to be extracted.

For .zoo files:

for f in **/*.zoo; do
  (cd ${f%\/*} && zoo -extract ${f##*\/} && rm ${f##*\/});
done

For .zip files:

for f in **/*.zip; do
  (cd ${f%\/*} && unzip ${f##*\/} && rm ${f##*\/});
done

For .lzh files:

for f in **/*.lzh; do
  (cd ${f%\/*} && unar ${f##*\/} && rm ${f##*\/});
done

.com files

So it might be possible to run DCL on Linux. A rather exhaustive list of the options seems to indicate that PC-DCL might be an option.

General cleanup

  • Removed exe and obj files: git rm **/*.{exe,obj}

Committing to the BULLETIN git repo

To get the right dates and authors in git, need to tweak these environment variables for each commit.

export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Mark London"
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="mrl%foo@bar"
export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="Jan 28 20:52:53 1982 +0000"