dfingerd 0.2
Copyright (c) 1999 David Lichteblau (david.lichteblau@snafu.de)


Before you start
----------------

Fetch `meta-0.2' from gd/contributions and install it.


Introduction
------------

dfingerd is a simple, restricted Finger daemon written in Dylan.

dfingerd is intended to be RFC 1288 compliant, but is restricted in the
sense that it explicitly refuses certain operations, specifically
  - indirect finger queries, and
  - empty finger queries.
Additionally, it respects "~/.nofinger" files and refuses to give away
information about users who have this file in their home.

These restrictions are similar to those present in Felix von Leitner's
ffingerd.  See
  ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/unix/security/ffingerd/
  http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~leitner/ffingerd.html
for ffingerd.

See the file LICENSE for licensing information.


Status
------

THIS IS AN ALPHA STAGE RELEASE!  So far, dfingerd has not been tested
extensively and cannot be assumed to be anything near stable.

All tests have been done on Linux, where the daemon seems to work.  The
Makefile has been changed so that both libc5 and glibc2 work.

The program can _not_ be assumed to be too portable, but should
theoretically work on every Unix-like system that is supported by
Gwydion Dylan (see below), given some minor modifications.  As the
language Dylan is--in contrast to C--portable, portability problems are
likely only in connection with the header files needed for low-level
access to C functions.


Compilation and Installation
----------------------------

See INSTALL.


Files
-----

	dfingerd.lid	dfingerd library definition
	*.dylan		Source code for d2c
	*.intr		Interface code to be preprocessed by Melange
	c/*		Interface code written in C


	Interesting Sources:

	dfingerd.dylan	Finger daemon
	meta.dylan	META, a language for parsers
	
	Boring Sources:

	tools.dylan	Various helpful Finger-independent functions
	intr.dylan	Unix interface
	misc.dylan	Miscellany

	
Thanks
------

Thanks to Felix von Leitner who wrote ffingerd and kindly answered my
questions.

Many thanks also to the Gwydion Dylan maintainers who helped me
understand their tools.