weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Matthew P Wiener) (07/11/88)
Gnews 1.8 is now available for anonymous ftp, ucbvax:/pub/gnews-1.8-tar.Z. This file should be 256107 bytes long. I strongly recommend you upgrade to this version. I've rewritten numer- ous internals from the point of view of speed and garbage. The speed-up and decrease in garbage is significant. And among the extras, the big winner is probably digest-mode. See the changes below. It took a long time, but I finally got the idea of testing Spool.el code using a toy news spool. It only has 3 newsgroups and 30 articles, so I probably miss many problems. A somewhat ugly version of fast indexing has been made available. (I have a "better" version, but it uses a wee bit of C code.) Among other things, spoolers must now forget about using specialized hooks, but instead set nntp-service to nil. I will e-mail one copy to Europe--about 350K--if someone will make it generally available over there. I tried using BITNET these past few days, but it was hopeless. Other than the manual, I'm going to sit on this version for a few months or more. (And by the way--please let me know what you would like to see or would have liked to have seen-before-you-figured-it-out-the-hard-way in the manual.) I received the following e-mail from jkp@hutcs.hut.fi (Jyrki Kuoppala) [also @ ...!mcvax!santra!hutcs!jkp and jkp@finhutcs.bitnet]. |Version 1.4 works just fine on our Altos 3068 SysV R2 machines w/ |emacs version 18.49 after I wrote the open-network-stream function |for the Excelan EXOS TCP/IP software we are using. If anyone is |interested in using Gnews with System V and EXOS, I'd be happy to |share the code. Of course, something like this will eventually migrate into Emacs itself. Happy Gnewsing, ucbvax!garnet!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Changes from 1.6, the last announced version, are: 1.6 => 1.7 (30.6.88) Several speed/GC improvements: news-{next,previous}-unread (n,p) are faster. amark internals revamped to use setcar/setcdr/nconc; this should make for both speed and much less garbage collection. News- group checkpointing is also faster and less of a GC hog. Startup, unfortunately, is slightly slower. Due to popular demand, news-restart (R) added. It restarts all of the NNTP internals and checkpoints everything in sight. Formfeeds are now caught. They do not yet mix with rot13, which is due for an overhaul anyway. Put (per nil article-digest) in the hook-kills of digest newsgroups, eg, comp.risks. This isn't digest-mode yet, but the improvement is dramatic. In particular, article-digest-next (n) moves forward one digest article. The user variable gnews-buffer-clean has been added: non-nil (the default) means delete, as opposed to bury, Gnews' buffers. (You could unwittingly lose an unsent reply this way. Caveat user.) group-forward-article unbound, since M-f is and will remain forward-word by default. I've changed things so that "C-u r" and "C-u R", that is, e-reply with a prefix argument, runs group-forward-article. The cursor is now, by default, always in the minibuffer in news-mode. It works for me, but if it messes things up for you, turn it off by setting news-grab-cursor to nil. Replies now erase, by default, the *gnews*reply* buffer's contents if the previous message has been sent. Unsent messages still need confirmation before erasing. See the documentation of reply-query-clear for the details. The amark-list variable has been renamed amark. Minor bug in news-last-seen (-) fixed. Minor bugs where the running dots froze without a prompt on new newsgroups, and with temporary kill and permanent KILL side effecting each other fixed. Serious bug in non-terse junking with article-get-slow in hook-kills fixed. Serious bug in gnews- output-to-rmail-file (o) fixed. 1.7 => 1.8 (11.7.88) New new newsgroup detector put in. When you get the new newsgroup message, use news-new (~G) to go into a subscription loop. Use name expansion to see the offered groups, and keyboard-quit (^G) to break the loop early. gnews-hook-kill-alist added, to allow a group's permanent kills and editing to refer to a regexp instead of the group name. This makes it simple to handle the hook-kills for related newsgroups together. group-quit-restore added, but not bound. You can quit a newsgroup and restore the .gnewsrc to what it was upon entry. article-header-hook is run upon exit from article-display-init (which initializes the header and header info) and article-restart-verbose (v). This permits radical header customization. article-digest-previous (p) moves back one digest article. Numerous '(lambda ...)s turned into (function (lambda ...))s. The nntp- -index-filter is much less GC piggish. Index-sort is now faster. New variable index-ding controls behavior upon completion of indexing. nil means finish silently. t means ding the user. Numeric means ding if the number of indexed articles is greater than this number. Spool code simplification: you can throw out the specialized start hook. In fact, you must. Simply install Gnews with a nil nntp-service, and Gnews will do all the necessary scut work for you. Fast indexing, con- trolled by news-index-fast, is now available for spool code also, and is the default. Bug where $-end pseudo-article (treated internally as one more than the last article) could sometimes be junked fixed. Bug where group-first (^) sometimes got the second article fixed. Bug in the handling of formfeeds after a failed article-previous-unread (p) fixed. Bug in cancel/super- session with non-empty mail-header-separator fixed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (07/12/88)
weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu writes:
Gnews 1.8 is now available for anonymous ftp, ucbvax:/pub/gnews-1.8-tar.Z.
Gnews 1.8 just now appeared on osu-cis for anonymous UUCP. The usual
instructions apply; request /u/public/gnews/gnews1.8.Z-a[abc].
--Karl