dpk (07/30/82)
#N:brl-bmd:5200005:000:2907 brl-bmd!dpk Jul 30 04:29:00 1982 I hereby announce the installation of Notesfiles at Brl-Bmd. Notesfiles are wonderful. (so whats new...) I thought I would let you know how our installation has gone so far, and announce our "fixes" to certain problems. Problems: 1. Didn't know what "SUPERMAILER" was (moot point, see later) 2. Only system definitions for V6, and UNIX4.0 and a statement "otherwise assumes 4.1BSD". What about V7 and 3.0? And we run a union of V6/V7. 4.1 seemed to work 3. Source code written on 132 column terminal?? 4. Mailit.c: We are running the MMDF mail system and we have an intelligent mail sender (Send). I was able to throw out lots of code from mailit(). It now calles send with the Subject line, and the name of a file to include if necessary. 5. makefile: the last couple of line which dealt with OBJECTS and HELPFILES caused my PDP11 "make" to run out of memory (Ray is on a VAX and didn't notice) 6. Rewrote "syncnews" as a Bourne shell script 7. The documentation did not print properly, pagination was all wrong. No solution yet. 8. I fake ioctl TIOCGETP/TIOCSETP, but not TIOC[SG]ETN, my problem, just changed to SETP/GETP. 9. cursor.c: Big problem here. We are using the 2.8BSD termlib.a and it needs to have the "up" and "bc" for some terminals. It uses these if the characters generated by a cursor control sequence would possibly be interpreted by the tty driver (NL, TAB, NULL, EOT). I also rewrote the handling to allocation of space in here. 10. do "*[]?" work in the .nfseq files pointed at by the NFSEQ environment variable? 11. There should be a general notesfiles aliasing facility so that something like "long-notesfiles-name" can be aliased to "shortname". I have talked to ray about this, and if he doesn't get to it, I will. 12. Having the erase/kill type characters hardcoded in is a pain. We use the DEC standard set here (RUB, ^U) and do not allow the users to change it. 13. When you use E to change a note, it forces you to type in the title again, Why? 14. When using the built in pager to look at long notes, the percentage number in the corner bear no relation to reality. We are running Bnews2.7 and probably won't change to 2.9 for a bit, just not enough time, but we are interested in work on interfacing Notesfiles and Bnews. There are still some reasons for keeping the news system around. Net.sources has the potential to have files larger than 65535 characters and I not sure how to handle control messages. What happens to news articles for which there is no notesfile. I will be glad to send anyone the changes I have made if they are interested, or to the group if there is suitable interest. Even with the problems I am still amazed at how easily it went in. Thank you Ray Essick! Doug Kingston Ballistic Research Laboratory UUCP: decvax!brl-bmd!dpk ARPA: dpk@brl
essick (07/31/82)
#R:brl-bmd:5200005:uiucdcs:23300013:000:1130 uiucdcs!essick Jul 30 22:13:00 1982 Doug Kingston and I spent an hour on the phone yesterday and solved most of his problems, and some of my mistakes. Some further info on various points in his letter: 5: (makefile) I think that this is repaired. The copy he had has about 60 files on the left side of a dependency rule. I have since decided that what I had was wrong anyway, and have modifed it. 10: ( []?* in .nfseq files) Yes, they work. I believe that you can use a shell meta-character from just about anywhere that you would want to. The place that I know you can't is when nesting notesfiles (it doesn't really make sense to do so there). 12: (hardwired erase/kill) pointed out by many people. Several people have sent me the modifications for using the user's settings, and I'll post the updated code later this weekend. 13: (why a new title on E command) The E command is implemented simply by (1) saving the text, (2) delete the old note, and (3) call the note writing routine and have it include the text that was in the old note. Passing the old title around just didn't fit in easily. Ray Essick, University of Illinois uiucdcs!essick