[net.news.b] assorted bugs in 2.10.1

mp@whuxle.UUCP (Mark Plotnick) (06/27/84)

Here are some miscellaneous bugs I won't get around to fixing for awhile.
If anyone has some spare time, they might want to do some code digging.
It's of course possible that your version of netnews doesn't have these bugs.

If you give readnews the -r option, it will frequently say
"No news", even if you have news waiting.  Sometimes it will show
articles from the first group that has news, and then exit.

If the target of a '<' command lies in a group you have unsubscribed to,
you'll be resubscribed to it.

The -t option doesn't update your .newsrc. This is probably just as
well, since the code currently marks all articles that don't have
the indicated title as having been read.  The .newsrc will be updated,
though, if you have the -u option on.

if you're reading group Y, and use - or e- to back up to newsgroup X,
and newsgroup X has either been unsubscribed to or completely read, the
bitmap isn't cleared, and readnews re-uses the bitmap of newsgroup Y
when it updates the rc line for nesgroup X.  It also resubscribes you
to newsgroup X, if you had previously unsubscribed to it.

when using the '<' command, the pngsize var is wrong
(the %%% in 'Article ### of %%%' is wrong)

If the newsgroup list of an article contains a blank, e.g.
'net.lang, net.flame', it will wind up only in net.lang, not
net.flame.  When you try to post a followup to the article, your
followup will be rejected.

The batcher writes its error messages to stdout.  Since stdout is
frequently piped into a uux command, your batched file may contain
spurious lines of the form ": cannot open xxx".  While the unbatcher
will resynchronize itself when it encounters such lines, the unbatcher
will NEVER GET INVOKED if the first line of the batch file is the
": cannot open" message.  Yes, this really happened to us.  I modified
checkbatch() to invoke the unbatcher if the file begins with either a #
or a :.

For purposes of deciding whether or not to transmit an article to a
given system, the Distribution list of an article takes precedence over
the Newsgroups list.  This unfortunately means that if you merely
specify distribution as "net" (e.g. by using the new postnews), your
message may not get transmitted to systems that get only specific
newsgroups. If an article contains the lines "Newsgroups:
net.unix-wizards", "Distribution: net", then the article will NOT be
distributed to a system whose entry in the sys file looks like
	foo:net.unix-wizards:


   Mark Plotnick