wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (10/19/84)
There are at least two old bugs, which have been around for at least two years, which have not been fixed in the new version of readnews. These are: 1) Whatever it is that screws up a random line in the .newsrc file when you quit out of readnews (I assume it is a random line; it is not the line for the group you were reading when you quit). For example, I just had quit out of readnews before lunch. When I returned and restarted it, it began displaying old, long-since read messages from net.aviation. That is because my .newsrc line for net.aviation had been altered to read: net.aviation: 1-397,403-446 from what it should have been, which is: "net.aviation: 1-446". I had to make that change with an edit of .newsrc. (I had run readnews both times with a shell script that called a specific group of newsgroups; it wasn't a straight "readnews", if that helps track it down.) 2) The bug in reading the last posting in a group; the display of the new group name and the header of the first item in that group causes the display of the preceeding item to scroll up and off the screen, which may cause you to have to "-" back to it to re-read the part that zipped by before you had a chance to see it. If this last-item-display has been handed off to "more", an artificial page-break (ctrl-l) should be stuck in as the last line, forcing more to wait and ask before ending. I wish the time devoted to adding extra delays and obtrusive helpfulness to "postnews" had instead been used to wipe out these bugs. They are not unknown, or locally-unique; I recall seeing other posters complain about them over the past "n" months, so their existence was known to the developers. They won't kill you, and they're not as bad as the newly-introduced skipping-over of "false-zero-length" items; but they are annoying and waste readers' time. Their effect is to slow down reading, by forcing the readers to either re-see old items (you don't realize the old stuff is old unless you pay atention to the item numbers and notice that you are suddenly 50 or 100 from the last item, instead of 5 or 10, as you were before!) or to redisplay the same item over again to catch the missed text. More distasteful than oppressive; still annoying. Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA