ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) (01/30/85)
Since it is not clear when 2.11 will be released, I decided to release the code as it currently stands to let people benefit from its features. There are a few things that could be cleaned up. but no known bugs. This release includes a number of new features, including grouping of articles by discussion, an index page, and a more efficient parent command. One simple feature that you may not notice when reading the documentation is that erase and kill processing is now done on the count. Vnews has undergone a major internal reorganization designed to make vnews more maintainable and extensible in the future. The vnews source is now independent of the rest of the netnews source, but the generally useful routines have been broken out into a library so that they can be reunited. The localize.sh procedure has been replaced with a config file. Included in this release is a program called postnm, which combines the functions of recmail and inews -h in one program. Because postnm performs more error checking than inews -h, sites are encouraged to install it even if they don't want to run vnews. Vnews uses a new file (called artfile) to keep information about articles. Be warned that this file may be two or three times the size of the history file. This file should really be maintained by inews and expire, but currently there are separate programs to do this. A change to inews is still required to allow it to pass the history line to the afinsert program (which adds new articles to artfile), but this change is simple and merely involves copying a version of ifuncs.c into your netnews source directory and recompiling if you have made no local changes to ifuncs.c. The file install.doc gives installation instructions. If you find any problems, let me know and I will try to fix them. (Try not to scorch my mailbox too badly.) I also welcome general comments and suggestions. Kenneth Almquist
avolio@grendel.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio) (01/31/85)
Not that I don't trust Ken, but... Since the new version of vnews we
just received requires changing how a number of other things are done
-- the new artfile, for example -- I wonder if this version of vnews
will be part of the next release of the news software? I don't want
to do things that I'll have to undo when news 2.10.3 or 2.11 comes
out.
Thanks.
--
Fred Avolio {decvax,seismo}!grendel!avolio 301/731-4100 x4227