david@bragvax.UUCP (David DiGiacomo) (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. Postnews (and therefore replies and followups) 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 code is modified to not insert the entire text of the referenced article in followups. (I'll fix this, but I thought I'd mention it.) 5. Postnews 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. (I'll fix this too.) 6. Chuqui's patch to tack on .signature at the end of a reply seem to insert it right after the header instead (I can probably find this one myself). 7. 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 handle TSTP properly -- 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)