{(sk:page-preamble "Welcome to Yenta" (ui:index-icon) (ui:index-icon-alt))}

# Five - How to get Yenta

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Yenta currently runs only under UNIX. We are looking for volunteers to help port it to other operating systems, such as Windows or the Mac. We can help you, but you must be a skilled programmer for whatever system you're porting to, and you must agree to distribute your code when you're done.

Yenta is export-restricted. Since Yenta uses strong cryptography, and was developed in the United States, electronically exporting it outside of the United States and Canada is a violation of US law. This is true even though SSLeay, which Yenta uses as its cryptographic library, was developed in Australia. If you live in the United States and Canada, please do not give Yenta to those outside of this region, and do not mirror Yenta releases on servers that do not enforce this prohibition. There are legal ways around this (such as printed books -- this is how PGP was legally exported internationally), but they have not yet happened, and probably won't for this release. If you don't live in the US or Canada, therefore, you won't be able to run Yenta. You can critique the non-cryptographic portions of its source code, however.

This is an alpha-release version, and it expires. Because this is an alpha release, it is expected that newer versions will follow rapidly. So as not to have to support infinitely-old alpha versions once better versions are released, these versions expire. You can still use an expired Yenta, but it will nag you on every page that it has expired, and that you should get a new one. As Yenta becomes more stable, later versions will have longer and longer expiration times. Starting at some later release, Yenta will not expire. You should still stay as current as you can on releases, of course. And, for those programmers among you, please do not build versions of Yenta that have their expiration logic removed. Doing so will only make life harder for the implementors, and thus all of Yenta's users.

Precompiled binaries are available. You can get precompiled binaries for Red Hat Linux 5.1, HPUX 9 and 10, SGI Irix 6.2, NetBSD 1.3.2, and Solaris 5.6. There is also an experimental Alpha OSF1 release, which may or may not work well for you.

Other UNIX variants probably work fine, but we don't have access to them to test, and you'll have to build your own from source. If you build your own, please let us know if it worked!

Source code is available. You can build your own version of Yenta from its source code. It uses GNU autoconf and automake utilities, so in the best case, you should be able to just type "./configure; make" to make the binary, and then just one more command to build the final program. You can also critique Yenta's code via Yvette, and you are encouraged to do so.

MIT Athena users can use Yenta by doing add yenta; yenta at the shell prompt; source code is in /mit/yenta/src. Since your workstation will reboot (and kill Yenta) when you log out, you should shut Yenta down manually, via the Requests page, before you log out. Otherwise, you may lose any changes since the last time Yenta decided to checkpoint its state; checkpoints currently happen every hour. These changes may include messages you've sent or received, or knowledge of other Yentas that yours has encountered.

{(ui:pitch-has-been-seen #t)} [ Do you want to know why Yenta was developed? See the next page. ]

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