wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (11/21/84)
Just wanted to check on this: Some time back I reported on a couple bugs from long ago, which are still around in the latest release of (at least) readnews. One was discussed on this group to great lenght; the other, the subject bug, though it has been mentioned in the past by other news readers, seems to have been generally ignored. This "comma-insertion" bug is the one that will screw up one line in your .newsrc file after you quit out of readnews. It doesn't trash the line; it modifies it carefully and in the correct format, to indicate that you had skipped over some messages which you had, in fact, really read. It will take a line like: net.flame: 1-1234 and make it into: net.flame: 1-1199,1230-1234 which means that you will get postings 1200-1229 all over again when you next fire up readnews on net.flame. The numbers and groups selected for this gratuitous modification seem to be random; I'm sure they are not, but are selected by the code for some specific reason caused by the bug. However, they appear to be random in that I cannot predict when and where these changes will show up in my .newsrc. I do a "grep , .newsrc" after every news-reading session now, and edit the file to eliminate any such changes when they appear. This is tedious. If this has been traced and fixed, would someone explain what has been causing this? If it hasn't been located yet, it might help for me to mention that I often do a "!sh" command and drop into lower forks to do things while running readnews; maybe this causes this behavior? Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA