This is the Amiga port of TIN. To use it you will need to do the following:

Have appropriate directories assigned (UULIB: UUNEWS:).
Have these environment variables set:

NODENAME
USERNAME
REALNAME
HOME
EDITOR

TIN only works with a hierarchical news directory. This means you will
need Dillon's UUCP1.16 or higher. TIN has been modified to work with
Dillon's Sendmail & Postnews programs. These take different arguments
from standard UNIX mail and news programs. With release 1.1 PL 9 of TIN
two further environment variables can been defined:

TIN_POST (default "uucp:c/postnews %s") and
TIN_MAIL (default "uucp:c/sendmail <%s -f %s").

If you set these variables, you can configure TIN for any other news/mail
system. The %s in TIN_POST gets replaced with a filename containing the
news article. TIN_MAIL's first %s is a filename, the second is the userid
of the person sending the mail, and the third (if present), is the userid
of the recipient of the mail.

Printing is now available. You will have to edit the .tin/tinrc file to
enable it. The "default_printer" string should be set to "copy PIPE: PRT:"
instead of its default setting. This option has not been added to the
internal menu of configurable options.

The editor you use with TIN should not return instantly, so if you are
using CED or TTX (or probably some others too) you will need to also add
in the appropriate options in the environment variable EDITOR (see script
file below) which will force your editor to wait until you've quit the
editor. Unless you have an editor which understands the argument +7 to
mean "start editing at line 7", you should set "Editor Offset" in the
configuration menu (type shift-M) to OFF. An example startup script is
given here (I've renamed tin to tin.exe so you can call this script TIN):

----------------------------------
; For WB2.0 users, the setenv's can be set's instead. This allows multiple
; users to run with their own names etc. WB1.3 users have to use setenv.

setenv USERNAME fred
setenv REALNAME "Fred Flinstone"
setenv NODENAME bedrock   ; This should be just your node name, not the
                          ; entire domain.
setenv HOME    dh0:news   ; wherever you want your news & index files
                          ; stored
setenv EDITOR  c:ed
stack 40000               ; TIN requires a large stack!
actived                   ; create a new active file
delete uulib:active
rename uulib:newsactive uulib:active
tin.exe                   ; start tin itself
---------------------------------

Actived creates an "active" file. This is a standard file in Unix
environments, but missing from DUUCP. Actived also sets the environment
variable "TIN_GROUPS" to equal the number of newsgroups. This variable
isn't necessary to run TIN, but allows TIN to save some memory. If you
don't wish to run actived before TIN, you may wish to copy TIN_GROUPS
to ENVARC: (WB 2.0+ !!).

More options, and use of tin is explained in the file tin.nrf. (The
standard manual page that comes with TIN).

The following options have been disabled from the TIN source for the Amiga
version:

- Archive extraction. Note that 1.1 PL 9 has now enabled uudecoding and
un-shar'ing of posted archives. This requires "uudecode" and "unshar" to
be in the path.

- Shell escape and piping to any shell command.

- Ability to change News and Mail directories.

- Re-reading of the active file while reading news has been disabled. So has
updating index files in the background (-U option).

These options were disabled partly to make TIN easier to port, but also
to make it secure enough to run as a newsreader for a Bulletin Board.

A TIND program (for creating/updating index files) exists, and is only any
use on a BBS. To make TIN aware that you are using TIND to update the
index, you must set the environment variable TIND (it doesn't matter what
you set it to!). The index files are by default stored in the UUNEWS:
directory, in a subdirectory called .index (as in UNIX). For performance
reasons, you may wish to change the directory to a different drive. By
setting the environment variable TIN_INDEX, you can force the index files
to be stored in $TIN_INDEX/.index.

Another two environment variables LINES and COLUMNS can be set to specify
the size of your screen. Inside an Amiga window this isn't required, as TIN
can query the window size, but once again, if you're running on anything
other than the Amiga's console, this query string won't work. If TIN finds
the LINES and COLUMNS environment variables set, it will not try to query
the window size.

If you are planning on using TIN in a multi-user environment, such as with
a BBS, you should take a look at the companion archive to this one, which
is called DLGTIN.LHA. Even though this has been set up explicitly for DLG,
it contains executables and documentation which will be useful for any setup
of this type.

 - Mark Tomlinson         (mark@garden.equinox.gen.nz)
   Geoff McCaughan        (geoff@satori.equinox.gen.nz)
