[net.news.b] News 2.10.2 problems

david@bragvax.UUCP (10/17/84)

I just installed 2.10.2, and it seems to have a lot of problems.  I
guess at least some of them are my fault, since I installed about 30
patches and mods by hand.  Anyway, I would appreciate any suggestions
about the following:

1. When an article arrives with no valid groups specified, the resulting
file in the junk directory is 0 bytes.

2. Articles which get ZAPNOTEd end up with "0 lines" in the header.  (I
thought Mark Stein's patch would fix this, but...)

3. When inews barfs on an article, the resulting ~/dead.article file
contains an inews-generated header, but not the article itself.  (It's
interesting that when this happens postnews has already printed a
message saying that the article was posted successfully.)

4. The reply and followup code no longer gives the editor the filename
of the referenced article as a second argument.  This is a big loss for
EMACS users, especially if the followup code is modified to not insert
the entire text of the referenced article in followups.  (If you don't
delete or restrict this "feature", don't try to post a followup to a
news distribution shar with 2000 lines (Hmmm... maybe that was the
idea)).  (Could someone tell me what the vi "endflag" kludge in postnews
is doing?)

5. The reply and followup code makes no provision for deleting
editor-created backup files in /tmp; this seems to be necessary for CCA
EMACS.  This was a problem in 2.10, of course, but it was a lot easier
to fix in the shell scripts.  It's easy to add this, but it's annoying
to have to do it in 3 places (postnews + reply*2).  (I guess I don't
need any suggestions for this one.)

6. 2.10.2 vnews seems like a total loss.  It is about 4x slower than
2.10, it screws up end-of-line underlines on a Televideo (like the
classic more bug), it doesn't restore the tty stats properly after being
stopped and unstopped -- what happened??  (I'm going through the diff to
find out, but it's huge.)

If it helps, we are running 4.1BSD on a 750, and I had a negative
attitude during installation.  (News software seems particularly
attitude-sensitive.)

-- 
David DiGiacomo, BRAG Systems Inc., San Mateo CA  (415) 342-3963
(...decvax!ucbvax!hplabs!bragvax!david)

stein@fortune.UUCP (Mark Stein) (10/18/84)

> I just installed 2.10.2, and it seems to have a lot of problems.
In defense of 2.10.2, I brought it up here with no problems at all
(4.1BSD on an 11/780, and on the Fortune 68000 machine).

> 1. When an article arrives with no valid groups specified, the resulting
> file in the junk directory is 0 bytes.
If you installed the XREF patch from rn, this is a bug which is
introduced by the patch.  I have sent a fix to Larry Wall for inclusion
in the next rn bux fix posting.

> 2. Articles which get ZAPNOTEd end up with "0 lines" in the header.  (I
> thought Mark Stein's patch would fix this, but...)
My patch only fixes this problem if your site is the one which strips off
the notes stuff.  If the article is ZAPNOTEd somewhere else, and they
don't have the fix installed, then it's too late.  By the way, this
seems to be happening alot lately.

> 6. 2.10.2 vnews seems like a total loss.  It is about 4x slower than
> 2.10, it screws up end-of-line underlines on a Televideo (like the
Try using rn.  Very nice (although I don't know whether the
Televideo problem is present there).

			      Mark Stein, Fortune Systems
			      {amd,hpda,ihnp4}!fortune!stein

lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall) (10/22/84)

In article <4513@fortune.UUCP> stein@fortune.UUCP (Mark Stein) writes:
>If you installed the XREF patch from rn, this is a bug which is
>introduced by the patch.  I have sent a fix to Larry Wall for inclusion
>in the next rn bux fix posting.

A patch for this has been posted.  It also fixes the problem with checkgroups
control messages telling you to remove all non-local groups. :-(

>> 6. 2.10.2 vnews seems like a total loss.  It is about 4x slower than
>> 2.10, it screws up end-of-line underlines on a Televideo (like the
>Try using rn.  Very nice (although I don't know whether the
>Televideo problem is present there).

As it happens, rn was developed on a Televideo 920, and is well aware of
the ideosyncracies of that sort of terminal.

Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall