perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison) (09/14/89)
On two occasions recently, rn has trashed my .mailrc file. The first time, it declared all my newsgroups to be bogus, and unsubscribed them. I have no idea why. The second time, the disk containing .newsrc was full. There were several kernel messages about failed writes, and presumably rn received some sort of error indication, but the error was not handled well if at all. This is on SunOS 3.5 (4.2BSD). The v command to rn gives @(#)$Header: rn.c,v 4.3.1.4 85/09/10 11:05:13 lwall Exp $
tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (09/15/89)
.mailrc or .newsrc? We have been having similar problems with rn here
and I would certainly enjoy a fix for them even though I never use the
programme. The maze of #ifdef's combined with a lack of time has
prevented me from looking as closely at it as I would like.
The two most common complaints I get from users regarding rn are
these:
o "rn trashed my .newsrc!! There's nothing there!"
o "Hey, it just said all my groups were bogus and unsubscribed me!!!"
The first is generally caused for them by quotas on disk usage. rn
writes the .newsrc when it exits and no problem is necessarily
noticed. Even if a peculiar error message is seen, many of the
non-Unix types don't understand what it means. So the next time rn
gets run, it copies .newsrc to .oldnewsrc and now they don't even have
a way to back out to the state of things before all the trashing
started happening. There are various kludges around this; I wrote an
rn shell script which called the real rn after doing a test on
zero-length .newsrc and attempting a restore from .oldnewsrc if
necessary. It really is something that should be dealt with from rn
itself, though.
The second problem can be caused by me quite easily -- all I have to
do is edit the active file. For example, our site accepts newgroups
by default but not rmgroups. If I need to rmgroup something, rn will
puke. Rather than getting a fresh look at the picture of news in
general, it makes the completely erroneous assumption that all of the
subscribed groups in a .newsrc are bogus, unsubscribes the user
without asking, and moves the newly unsubscribed groups to the end of
.newsrc. This is _very_ anti-social and also something that clearly
is better handled by the rn programme.
If anyone has patches for either of these problems, they would be
greatly appreciated here.
Dave
--
(setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison) (09/16/89)
In article <7326@rpi.edu> tale@pawl.rpi.edu writes: >.mailrc or .newsrc? Oops. Yes, I meant .newsrc. That's what I get for reading/posting news late at night. I guess I have to leave the "Subject" wrong now, or I'll break rn's thread-following. -- ... tektronix!sequent!ccssrv!perry