[news.software.anu-news] 2 problems and a suggested improvement

BEN@SPCVXA.BITNET (Ben Cohen) (02/24/90)

Hello all,
   Here at St. Peter's College, we recently installed News V5.9C, running under
VMS V5.3. So far, most things are fine, but we are having a couple of problems
and I have one improvement that would make things easier to use. (I haven't
taken the time to look at the source to see how difficult/easy the improvement
would be.)
   Problems first:
   1) There are two newsgroups which refuse to stay "SET SEEN" (or read)
whenever News is invoked. The newsgroups (if that helps) are "nj.general" and
"nj.wanted". I can read through all of the items, do a SET SEEN, do a SKIP,
etc. For the "current" News session, they stay that way. I can do a DIR/NEW or
DIR/ALL and they show up as read. If I exit News and search through the NEWSRC.
file, they show up as:
     
nj.general: (1) [0,9] <9
nj.wanted: (1) [0,12] <13
     
   However, if I do a NEWS/ALLSCAN (or just go into News), it insists that they
are unread and I need to SKIP them every time.
   Has anyone else seen this type of behavior or does Geoff know anything about
this?
   2) The MAIL profile information is _not_ being used for either personal
name, or for copy-self. Is this a VMS 5.3-ism and, if so, is there an upcoming
version of News that will fix this?
     
   Suggestion/improvement:
   1) This one is an either/or :-). Either allow other commands besides
DEFINE/KEY in the NEWS_INI file (so that commands like SET LINE_EDITING or SET
NOMANAGER could be included); or, add these, at least (I haven't run into
others that I'd want permanently SET-able), to PROFILE-able data. [A corrolary
to this would be that .COMs generated from control. newsitems would need to do
an explicit SET MANAGER before trying to create a newsgroup, etc.]
     
   Thanks in advance,
     
Ben Cohen                       Bitnet:   Ben@SPCVXA
Saint Peter's College           Internet: Ben@spcvxa.spc.edu
Jersey City, NJ  USA            UUCP:     ...!rutgers!njin!spcvxa!ben
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