usenet@ucbvax.UUCP (05/07/83)
At long last, version 2.10 of B news is available. A copy can be found on ucbvax, seismo, and harpo in ~/news.tar. All backbone sites are encouraged to update as soon as possible, and any other sites who wish to update are also encouraged to do so. If you have a prerelease of 2.10, it is not the same as 2.10. Unless you have MODGROUPS in inews.c, you should upgrade to the released version 2.10. The tar image is large - 706000 bytes, or about 1.8 hours at 1200 baud. For this reason, it is not being posted to net.sources. Get it from your Usenet neighbor. If they don't have it, ask them to get it from their Usenet neighbor. If you have a direct UUCP connection to a site that already has it, you can get it from there. All sites getting the 2.10 distriution are requested to keep it in ~uucp/news.tar long enough for their neighbors to get a copy. Backbone sites are asked to keep it as long as possible. Version 2.10 is a substantial upgrade from 2.9. The user interface has the same flavor, but is better in many ways. The headers shown are briefer. Internet mail is supported, if your site has it. (So is old style mail if you don't.) You are now always placed in an editor from postnews, followup, and reply; you can edit headers as well as text. Long articles no longer run off the top of the screen when more exits. Significant internal changes have been made, also. readnews and checknews are about 5 times faster. inews is up to 3 times faster, if you make use of batching hooks. Batching is available on an experimental basis. Some improvements to UUCP to cut down on your system load are also included in the distribution. The limitation of 13 unique characters in a newsgroup is no longer necessary. The Usenet standard for interchange of news is supported, while maintaining upward compatibility with 2.9 and A news. This version has been run on many test sites and has gotten quite a bit of testing. No enhancements have been made for a month, in an effort to get a stable distribution. So it's a fairly solid package. However, each new site that has received the distribution has found at least one problem resulting in a change to the distribution; so don't be surprised if you have a few problems. Don't expect any major problems, however, the problems found are usually easily gotten around. There will probably be a 2.11 within a month or two, incorporating any bug fixes from 2.10 and including some more enhancements to the user interface that are being tried experimentally now. Please report bugs found (and the fixes, if possible) to net.news.b.