.Ch "C News vs. VMS"
.PP
.Ix VMS
To run C News at all,
you need a fairly good emulation of Unix.
There are several such for VMS.
They have various minor imperfections.
The only one we specifically \fIknow\fR of that is a real problem for
C News is the inability to make real links for cross-postings.
.Ix cross-posting
There is some half-hearted code in various places that tries to deal
with this situation.
It has \fInot\fR been tested too thoroughly.
.PP
.Ix relaynews
\fIRelaynews\fR normally files an article under its first group and then
makes hard links into further groups.
If \fIrelaynews\fR finds itself unable to make a hard link,
it will try making a symbolic link instead.
The one situation where this will fall down is if a news article's header
is enormous,
too big to fit in core.
In this case,
\fIrelaynews\fR stores the article in a temporary file,
makes links to it under all the appropriate names,
and then unlinks the
temporary name.
This obviously isn't going to work if the appropriate-name links are symbolic.
We believe this case essentially never happens on large-address-space
machines,
and is quite rare even for small address spaces.
.PP
.Ix expire
\fIExpire\fR has a \fB\-l\fR option that tells it to consider the first
name of an article as the ``leader'',
not to be deleted until all others
have been deleted.
.PP
The one place where extra work would be necessary would be \fImkhistory\fR,
.Ix mkhistory
which has no notion that some links are different from others.
.PP
So far as we know, we don't get into any of the other trouble areas of
Unix emulation on VMS,
at least with the Eunice emulator.
.Ix Eunice
We don't have a VMS handy for testing,
so we make no guarantees.