ricks@shambhala.Berkeley.EDU (Rick L Spickelmier) (12/14/89)
I don't use VN, but I had the same sort of problem in developing XRN. The format of the `active' file (the file that contains a list of groups, there first and last article numbers, and posting information) is: name last first flag name is the name of the newsgroup last is the number of the last article available first is the number of the first article available flag is one of y/n/m; for posting allowed, not allowed, or moderated. However, if first == last, that means that there are 0 OR 1 ARTICLES AVAILABLE. This is hosed. News readers use the active file to determine what articles exist and compare this with the .newsrc to find out what articles are unread. For groups with first == last, some readers say there is 1 article unread and then say "whoops, there really isn't" when the group is actually entered. The better solution is to find out what first == last means at the beginning of the session. Immediately after retrieving the `active' file, for each group with first == last, the reader can look at the group itself (file system for direct access, issue a GROUP command for NNTP) to find out how many articles are actually available, and thus give the correct number of articles at the start (unfortunately, I believe the NNTP GROUP specification says that the number of articles returned by the GROUP command does not have to be exact..., luckily nobody has implemented a server that just returns last - first + 1). Hope this makes some amount of sense... Rick Spickelmier UC Berkeley ricks@berkeley.edu
greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) (12/14/89)
One that's been annoying me for a while: vn, when in it's reading stage, sometimes lists groups for which there is no news. unsubscribing the groups (by editing ~/.newsrc) stops this - but I don't necessarily want to unsubscribe from them. Has anyone noticed this sort of behavious before?. Unfortunately, our previous sysadmin didn't keep up with the patches, and I don't know what patchlevel things are at. - I know they're ages behind though. Has anyone else experienced this, and is there a quick fix? Greyham. -- /* Greyham Stoney: Australia: (02) 428 6476 * * greyham@hades.oz - Ausonics Pty Ltd, Lane Cove, Sydney, Oz. * * ISDN: Interface Subscribers Don't Need */