OS/2 Professional/OS2PRO194.ISO/os2/com/utils/smplnews/readme.os2

Text File | 1992-08-02 | 10.6 KB | 252 lines

This is a news reader for OS/2 with UUPC 1.11k to 1.11q (perhaps even
older and newer versions, not tested). It is based on the SNEWS 1.12
reader for DOS but was heavily modified. See the change list below.


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The changes to SNEWS are:

- *LOTS* of null pointer references were eliminated which apparently
  were not catched in the original MS-DOS version because of DOS's lack
  of memory protection.

- Other bugs were corrected, such as closing null file pointers.

- A BIG memory leak was removed: read articles were not freed when
  returning from article read mode to thread selection mode via ESCAPE.

- Support for "local" groups was added, i.e. for groups, for which
  postings will not be sent to the server host but instead will be
  saved only in the local news database. This is useful for networked
  PC's which use UUPC to get news from a server but also have a need
  for local news groups. Local groups are marked as such by an uppercase
  (at least) first letter in the ng file.

- For better "multi-user" support, the UUPC passwd file is checked
  for names, full names and home directories if the LOGNAME environment
  variable is set. If the user RC file of UUPC is kept rather generic,
  the LOGNAME variable is sufficient to select the current user.

- Partial file locking was introduced to allow multiple readers on
  the same news database (including posting) in a PC network. When
  running the administrative programs (addgroup, rmgroup, expire,
  unbatch), nobody should be reading news at the same time.

- Articles can contain longer lines than before (up to 1024 characters
  per line). They are no longer wrapped at column 80. Instead, the
  reader can now scroll horizontally. The cursor right/left keys scroll
  the window. With CTRL pressed at the same time, they move to the
  right-/left-most column in the current window.

- The text lines are now saved in dynamically allocated memory, no
  longer in fixed length arrays. This saves much memory.

- Header field length limits were removed by storing them in
  dynamically allocated memory too.

- Moving up/down in articles line by line or pagewise stops when the
  end of the article is at the *bottom* of the screen in articles
  longer than the window height. In addition, END now moves to the
  end of the article.

- Posting/follow-up/forward/reply/help is now also possible by
  pressing the corresponding uppercase letter, not only by
  pressing the lowercase letter. Help is showed too when F1 is
  pressed.

- Backspace moves back in a thread to the previous article or to thread
  selection level from the first article in a thread.

- The current position (line and column offset if scrolled horizontally
  out of column 0) in an article is displayed in the upper right corner.

- The screen output has been changed from Turbo-C specific routines
  to a generic termcap library thus providing customizable colors. This
  makes the program independent of Turbo C too.

- The screen output has been enhanced by overwriting the screen instead
  of clearing it and thus removing the bad flickering (which was
  visible when running snews in a window).

- The screen size is no longer hardcoded to 80x25. Under OS/2, it works
  in any screen size, tested with 80x60 and 132x60, for example. Snews
  uses the additional display space.

- Some error messages were made more consistent throughout the program.

- Checking for remaining free memory makes no sense under OS/2.

- The signature is always included with replies/postings. For UUPC
  mail, the autosignature option should be disabled because replies
  would otherwise have two signatures. However, this way the user *sees*
  that his signature is included.

- The help screens have been enhanced a bit.

- The display in group and thread selection mode has been changed and
  made similar. The current and total number of groups/thread are
  displayed in the upper right corner.

- In thread selection mode, 'c' marks only the currently selected
  thread as read, no longer the entire group.

- TAB moves to the first thread with unread messages below the cursor
  when not on such a thread. When on a thread with unread messages,
  TAB reads that thread.

- When reading in the articles, snews scans the subject lines much
  smarter now and recognizes multipart postings in source/binaries
  groups and shows them as one thread. "Part x of y" and similar suffixes
  and "v07i0815:"-like prefixes are removed before comparing subjects.

- Reading a group's article headers and building the threads is *MUCH*
  faster now. The original version used a very simple O(n^2) algorithm
  where now an O(n * log n) version is used to build the threads.
  This makes quite a difference in speed. Reading a group with 700
  articles took 5.2 seconds with the old version on my machine,
  the new version needs only 0.85 seconds. With even larger groups
  (1000-2000 articles) the speedup is of course much higher.

- If a subject was changed in an article and the old one is appended
  like "xxxxx (was Re: yyyyy)", the new subject is now preserved.


Changes to UNBATCH:

- One copying step is avoided by reading from compress over a real
  pipe. This saves temporary hard disk space and speeds things up.
  This really works under OS/2 only. If unbatch is run under DOS, a
  temporary file in the TMP directory is used instead.

- Control messages are always put into a group "control" and do no
  longer appear in the target groups.

- When -n is used, *all* batches are now uncompressed and left in
  new temp files.


An executable for compress for OS/2 is included. It is very fast.
All executables run under OS/2 1.x and 2.x as well as under DOS (they
are family mode 16-bit programs).


Release of SNEWS /2 1.12 - May 26, 1992


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Changes for second release:

- News batches compressed by freeze and even uncompressed batches are
  now supported by unbatch.

- An executable for freeze is included as well.

- For replies, the mailer from the environment variable MAILER is used,
  if set, "mail" otherwise. This is for elm users, who want a copy of
  the outgoing reply in their recipient's mail folder.

- When replying, all junk (full names, whitespace) is stripped off the
  address read from the From: or Reply-to: fields.

- Forwarding/Mail-to of articles is now done with Resent-headers and
  rmail in RFC-822 mode. (Adapted from someone else's patches).

- For posting, a file "headers" in the news directory (where "active",
  "ng" etc. reside) is included and can contain customized header
  fields.

- Unbatch creates "junk news" only when there is *no* other group where
  an article can be saved now. As this is *very* unlikely to occur, you
  will rarely see any junk news now.

- Unbatch does no longer generate a temp file for each article, but
  stores it in memory instead.

- A bug in unbatch has been fixed, it scanned for Path: also outside the
  header and within the article body.

- Some screen update and horizontal-scrolling problems in snews solved.

- Snews now also detects "Patch08" and "Patch08/15" -like suffixes on
  subject lines and removes them in order to find the original thread the
  article belongs to. When saving threads to disk, order of articles is
  independent of leading whitespace on subjects.

- Help texts in snews were corrected.

- Better I/O buffering in snews, unbatch and expire. One may wish to add
  the treshold parameter to the DISKCACHE= statement in config.sys, set it
  to 128, see OS/2 online help.

- Expire can now expire specific groups. The expiration period is now
  entered with preceding hyphen, such as "expire -4" or "expire -0 junk"
  while as many group names can be given as wanted. The group
  names are matched using shell wildcard expansion, so one can enter:
  "expire -3 comp.os.ms-windows* *.sources*" etc.

- Expire no longer changes subjects while copying. It originally scanned
  for Subject: even in the article bodies without need to do so since
  the subject could be read from the index line which was already in memory
  anyway.

- For replying, a file "letter" and for posting a file "article" in
  the news directory are used for editing the text and these files are
  kept until the next reply/posting. This is similar to rn's
  behaviour. (Of course, the postings are still logged in post.log and
  replies are perhaps saved by mail/elm).

- During Mail-To, the outgoing message can be edited to add a short
  note, for example.

- New RNEWS program, delivers directly from UUXQT to news database
  without temporary files. If unpacking compressed/frozen batches, it
  works with real pipes to compress/freeze and a secondary (slave) rnews
  process. Therefore, it can only work under OS/2, not under DOS. Should
  work with any version of UUPC after 1.11k (perhaps even earlier)
  because it is independent of UUPC's original rnews program, which it
  replaces.

- In snews, on thread selection level, BACKSPACE enters a thread just
  like ENTER, but moves to the last rather than the first article.

- Snews saves articles/treads to disk now in mailbox format with a proper
  "From" line to allow later access to the articles with mail or elm.
  Posting log changed similarly.

- '?' does no longer invoke help, because it is used for backward
  searches on article level.

- Search forward/backward for text through article bodies on article
  reading level with + and - as well as with / and ? (which is a widely
  adopted convention).

- Search (forward) through subjects with + or through the whole articles
  with / on thread selection level. If searching through whole articles,
  snews still moves only the pointer to the thread in which there is an
  article containing the searched text. You then have to press ENTER or
  TAB to open this tread. If you then want to get to the actual article
  containing the text, press + or / and then just hit ENTER. I think it
  would be a bit confusing, if snews would move you directly to the
  article, because you would not have seen in which thread it was (yes,
  you would still have the subject line, but ...).


Release of SNEWS /2 2.0 - August 2, 1992


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Kai Uwe Rommel
Muenchen, Germany

Phone: [phone]
Fax:   [phone]

e-mail: [e-mail] (preferred, but UUCP, somewhat slow)
    or: [e-mail] (faster, for larger mails)