ricks@shambhala.Berkeley.EDU (Rick L Spickelmier) (08/01/89)
This is the announcement for the new release of XRN, version 5.4. There have been a number of important additions (particularly the patch from IBM for decreasing the memory usage). There are still many things to do, see the TODO file for a list. As always, use the 'GRIPE' button for reporting bugs and requesting new/different features. Note that we now include the patched versions of DiskSrc.c and Text.c rather than get a bunch of messsages about XRN core dumping on 'next article'... Text.c is heavily dependent on the particular release of X11 you have (it doesn't like R2). Rick Spickelmier (ricks@ic..berkeley.edu) Ellen Sentovich (ellen@ic..berkeley.edu) The following is a list changes from the last release of XRN: - considerably less memory usage XRN uses a very simple data structure for storing information about newsgroups and articles. For every newsgroup, an array the size of the number of articles available in that group is created. This causes XRN to grow to 2.5 to 3Meg at most sites (at UCB, we have 650 groups and 2 week expiration, and XRN groups to 3Meg). However there is no reason to keep article arrays for groups that you are not subscribed to. Bill Webb (IBM AWD Palo Alto, ...!uunet!ibmsupt!webb) sent in a set of patches to have XRN only create article arrays for subscribed to groups. This decreases the memory from 3Meg to 900k (for us). The amount you save will depend on what percentage of the newsgroups you subscribe to. - better nntp server error messages The messages XRN gives to the user for NNTP failures don't give you much information. Ian Darwin (ian@sq.sq.com) sent in a set of patches to improve the error messages. - alternative newsrcfile location Many people like to have xrn look for a newsrc file based on the particular server being used. Dirk Grunwald (grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu) sent in a set of patches to cause xrn to look for a newsrc file of the form <newsrcFile>-<nntpServer> before looking for just <newsrcFile>. - includeSep A new Xdefault has been added to get rid of the "> " characters put in front of included messages. Xdefault: includeSep: on/off Command Line: +/-includeSep - header lines are no longer broken The last release included code to break long lines in news postings to reasonable values. Unfortunately it would also break header lines (which is not allowed). This version does not break the header lines. - updated man page The man page has been updated to reflect the current state of XRN. - double click [note: this feature has not bee added to the man page - it still has some problems] Double clicking on a newgroup entry will send you to the group. Double clicking on an article entry will display the article. To retreive the xrn 5.4: % ftp shambhala.berkeley.edu (128.32.132.54) user: anonymous password: guest ftp> cd pub ftp> binary ftp> get xrn5-4.tar.Z ftp> quit % uncompress xrn5-4.tar.Z % tar xf xrn5-4.tar