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# Recreating bulletin

# 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 branch is where the gathering of the files was done and where they

were converted into more usable formats. The `historical` and `master`

branches contain the actual timeline of the code.

This repository contains the following main branches:

## Who wrote it

  * `release`    - A recreation of BULLETIN written in Go and designed

    to run under a single Unix user.                        84ff1ce

  * `conversion` - Multiple versions of the original source code.

The bulletin binary is designed to be run via the ssh command option for

an authorised key.  That will specify the user. This means that bulletin

will initialise itself with that user for that session.

The code is organised like so:

  * `ask`       - Contains routines for asking the user questions.

  * `batch`     - Contains the batch routines - the `-b` flag.

  * `dclish`    - A command line parser akin to DCL.

  * `decus`     - Historical version this version is based on.

  * `editor`    - An editor function.

  * `folders`   - A higher level version of `storage` routines.

  * `key`       - Routines for handling ssh keys.

  * `pager`     - A pager function.

  * `repl`      - Actions and commands for the REPL.

  * `storage`   - Lower level storage routines.

  * `this`      - The current session.

  * `users`     - Validation routines for users.

# History of BULLETIN

First, git commits need an author.  It would be nice to figure out

the author.  The version I used I suspect was written by

there do seem to have been some announcements and the code does note

some of the contributors.

## Where to find BULLETIN

## Where to find historical BULLETIN releases

The place to get it seems to be the

[DECUS archives](http://decuslib.com/).

The place to get it seems to be the [DECUS archives](http://decuslib.com/).

I tracked it down with help from Kent Brodie who I discovered via

[an old USENET post](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/bulletin$20vms/comp.os.vms/rzM2LQMl6Jo/y1BKhO7dv80J)

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](http://decuslib.com/zips/) 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)

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 `conversion` branch tracks

the steps taken to prepare to recreate the historical archive.

Once the `conversion` branch seems complete, I'll start creating

the historical archive.

The subsections below track the major conversion probems encountered

and the steps taken to address them.

### 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](http://jonesrh.info/dcll/dcll_why_i_use.html)

of the options seems to indicate that

[PC-DCL](http://users.skynet.be/michel.valentin/) 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"

```