🚀 go-pugleaf

No, the news path was fine.

The problem was that setting the news spool directory (or whatever
the doggoned variable was) in the site-init.el was a problem
because it used "~news/..." twiddle syntax. That was a problem in
site-init.el because using the "~user" notation causes a yellow pages
lookup on the suns, which in turn forces temacs to determine its
domainname in order to query the YP passwd server for that domain.
The domain name appears to be cached by the C library routine
so that it can be directly used in any later calls to look up
a user name. This is OK if the domain name is the same on the
machine that ran temacs as on the machine that executes xemacs (gnuemacs)
but woth exptools distribution to many different Sun networks
most of which don't have the same domain name then this loses.

I solved the problem by wrapping all calls to YP derived functions
in an 

    if(initialized){
           /* do normal YP call */
    }
    else{
           /* default to something for temacs and 
              don't call YP supported routines */
    }

This effected several locations in the C source code (I can send the
files if you want) and for all but one case I was able to comment
out or modify the source - the only case I couldn't fix was the
part that looked up the home directory for a user based on the username
with the "~user/..." syntax. I solved the problem by moving the
parts of site-init.el that depended on the twiddle notation to
default.el.

Result - no serious difference in the way gnuemacs works (the machine
name where gnuemacs is built is "EXPBUILD" in stead of ihlpa, or
hou2d or mercury or paint or whatever) and the routines that
return host name and user name are unaffected in xemacs. The only 
place that a difference is evident is when running temacs.

Chip