I think I've finally got a handle on what's going on, although I really don't
like my solution. In my last post, I had mentioned that I was getting the
message 'news-unpack: unknown program name.' Well I climbed into gdb to
finally figure out what was going on. Seems that when rnews unbatches news, it
looks through the news file, and if it sees #! cunbatch, what it tries to do
is spawn a piped process to uncompress the data. Turns out it's calling exexv
with '/usr/bin/compress' and the following arguments: news-unpack -d. I have
no idea what those arguments mean; they are not refered to in the man pages.

Now mind you I have INN 1.4 running under NetBSD-0.9a. I started poking around
/usr/bin. I tried a trick I used under NetBSD-0.9a, which is to rename the
file compress to compress.exec, and write a shell script to echo a message
with the calling arguments, and then call compress.exec. Well lo and behold, I
got a similar message compress.exec: unknown program name. Huh?

Upon further examination it appears to me that the compress executable is still
somehow linked with other utility programs. So with COMPAT_09 in my kernel,
I copied over compress from my NetBSD-0.9a box along with libc.so.4.0. 

This makes everthing work again. Although I really don't want to run
NetBSD-0.9a's compress! I have a feeling, if I were to compile the
world under NetBSD-1.0, and get rid of this linked executable stuff (I have no
idea if this is possible,) that NetBSD-1.0's compress would start working with
INN 1.4 again. Any clues? At least it's working again with a band-aid!

Gerry Simmons
simmons@darykon.wa.com