News 2.10.2 problems
da...@bragvax.uucp
guess at least some of them are my fault, since I installed about 30
patches and mods by hand. Anyway, I would appreciate any suggestions
about the following:
1. When an article arrives with no valid groups specified, the resulting
file in the junk directory is 0 bytes.
2. Articles which get ZAPNOTEd end up with "0 lines" in the header. (I
thought Mark Stein's patch would fix this, but...)
3. When inews barfs on an article, the resulting ~/dead.article file
contains an inews-generated header, but not the article itself. (It's
interesting that when this happens postnews has already printed a
message saying that the article was posted successfully.)
4. The reply and followup code no longer gives the editor the filename
of the referenced article as a second argument. This is a big loss for
EMACS users, especially if the followup code is modified to not insert
the entire text of the referenced article in followups. (If you don't
delete or restrict this "feature", don't try to post a followup to a
news distribution shar with 2000 lines (Hmmm... maybe that was the
idea)). (Could someone tell me what the vi "endflag" kludge in postnews
is doing?)
5. The reply and followup code makes no provision for deleting
editor-created backup files in /tmp; this seems to be necessary for CCA
EMACS. This was a problem in 2.10, of course, but it was a lot easier
to fix in the shell scripts. It's easy to add this, but it's annoying
to have to do it in 3 places (postnews + reply*2). (I guess I don't
need any suggestions for this one.)
6. 2.10.2 vnews seems like a total loss. It is about 4x slower than
2.10, it screws up end-of-line underlines on a Televideo (like the
classic more bug), it doesn't restore the tty stats properly after being
stopped and unstopped -- what happened?? (I'm going through the diff to
find out, but it's huge.)
If it helps, we are running 4.1BSD on a 750, and I had a negative
attitude during installation. (News software seems particularly
attitude-sensitive.)
--
David DiGiacomo, BRAG Systems Inc., San Mateo CA (415) 342-3963
(...decvax!ucbvax!hplabs!bragvax!david)
Mark Stein
(4.1BSD on an 11/780, and on the Fortune 68000 machine).
> 1. When an article arrives with no valid groups specified, the resulting
> file in the junk directory is 0 bytes.
If you installed the XREF patch from rn, this is a bug which is
introduced by the patch. I have sent a fix to Larry Wall for inclusion
in the next rn bux fix posting.
> 2. Articles which get ZAPNOTEd end up with "0 lines" in the header. (I
> thought Mark Stein's patch would fix this, but...)
My patch only fixes this problem if your site is the one which strips off
the notes stuff. If the article is ZAPNOTEd somewhere else, and they
don't have the fix installed, then it's too late. By the way, this
seems to be happening alot lately.
> 6. 2.10.2 vnews seems like a total loss. It is about 4x slower than
> 2.10, it screws up end-of-line underlines on a Televideo (like the
Try using rn. Very nice (although I don't know whether the
Televideo problem is present there).
Mark Stein, Fortune Systems
{amd,hpda,ihnp4}!fortune!stein
Larry Wall
>If you installed the XREF patch from rn, this is a bug which is
>introduced by the patch. I have sent a fix to Larry Wall for inclusion
>in the next rn bux fix posting.
A patch for this has been posted. It also fixes the problem with checkgroups
control messages telling you to remove all non-local groups. :-(
>> 6. 2.10.2 vnews seems like a total loss. It is about 4x slower than
>> 2.10, it screws up end-of-line underlines on a Televideo (like the
>Try using rn. Very nice (although I don't know whether the
>Televideo problem is present there).
As it happens, rn was developed on a Televideo 920, and is well aware of
the ideosyncracies of that sort of terminal.
Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall
Kenneth Almquist
article in followups by postnews, so I will release a few goodies from
2.11 vnews. My belief is that it should be possible to request the
parent of the article be included in the followup while you are editing
your followup.
If you run Gosling's emacs, bind the macro given below to ^X^Y. Then
typing ^X^Y will read in the body of the parent article and leave you
at the beginning of it. I translated this macro to work with Warren
Montgomery's EMACS; translations to other versions of EMACS should be
straightforward.
Ed does not have a macro facility, so I wrote a shell procedure called
gparent which should be invoked from ed as "r !gparent".
Vi has a macro facility, but I don't know how to use it. You could
invoke the gparent shell procedure just like you do from ed, but that
leaves the cursor at the end of the included article rather than the
beginning. Any vi wizards want to work on this one?
All these routines assume that $A is set to the file containing the
parent article. It is easy to patch postnews to do this. In the
routine edit, somewhere around line 294, you should see the line:
sprintf(buf, "exec %s %s %s", editor, endflag, tempfname);
If you use sh or ksh, change this to
if (orignal)
sprintf(buf, "A=%s exec %s %s %s", original, editor, endflag, tempfname);
else
sprintf(buf, "exec %s %s %s", editor, endflag, tempfname);
If you use csh, add a call to setenv instead.
Kenneth Almquist
--------- here is the gparent macro for Gosling's EMACS ---------
; This mlisp macro reads in the body of the article being followed up,
; preceding each line with a "> ".
; It is intended to be bound to ^X^Y.
(defun
(gparent
(end-of-file)
(save-excursion
(set-mark)
(insert-file (getenv "A"))
(re-search-forward "^$")
(next-line)
(erase-region)
(re-replace-string "^" "> ")
)
)
)
------- here is the gparent macro for Warren Mongomery's EMACS ------
Since the gparent macro for Warren Montgomery's emacs contains
control characters, it cannot be distributed directly over the
net. Here is a listing of the macro in octal:
030 031 034 147 160 141 162 145 156 164 040 055 040 151 156 163
145 162 164 040 142 157 144 171 040 157 146 040 157 162 151 147
151 156 141 154 040 141 162 164 151 143 154 145 012 276 000 030
074 101 012 305 025 030 022 030 030 000 030 074 136 044 012 223
016 027 030 055 033 061 064 000 030 074 076 040 012 030 074 136
012 222 122 033 062 010 030 055 033 061 064 030 030 032 012
------ here is the gparent shell procedure for users of ed ------
#!/bin/sh
a=${1-${A?}}
sed -e '1,/^$/d' -e 's/^/> /' $a
Kenneth Almquist
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