Description of problem: Red Hat 9 contains trn-3.6-21 as an rpm package. However, the install process leaves the system without an /etc/HOSTNAME file, and trn requires this file. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Just try running trn! Steps to Reproduce: 1. run trn Actual results: >trn Warning: Couldn't open /etc/HOSTNAME to determine hostname! Caught an internal error--.newsrc restored Expected results: trn should run normally. (Note that you'll need to set the NNTPSERVER environment variable to the name of an available NNTP server.) Additional info: The basic problem here is that trn doesn't use "gethostname", but rather looks in /etc/HOSTNAME. Setting up /etc/HOSTNAME would probably be generally helpful to other packages which expect the file to be present. It would also be trivial to patch trn to use "gethostname" However, I'm not sure whether anyone is actively maintaining this software any more.
Put a hostname in /etc/HOSTNAME to configure. Trying to retrofit a more reasonable convention for a program as old as trn is hardly worth the effort. The issue is not as simple as just using gethostname, as trn posts, and users often want their posts to appear as originating from a domain, not from a host.