From: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!brl-bmd!dpk
Newsgroups: net.notes
Title: Notesfiles Live at BRL-BMD - (nf)
Article-I.D.: brl-bmd.290
Posted: Fri Jul 30 04:30:27 1982
Received: Sat Jul 31 02:32:14 1982


#N:brl-bmd:5200005:000:2907
brl-bmd!dpk    Jul 30 04:29:00 1982

	I hereby announce the installation of Notesfiles
at Brl-Bmd.  Notesfiles are wonderful.  (so whats new...)
I thought I would let you know how our installation has
gone so far, and announce our "fixes" to certain problems.

Problems:
	1.	Didn't know what "SUPERMAILER" was  (moot point, see later)
	2.	Only system definitions for V6, and UNIX4.0 and
		a statement "otherwise assumes 4.1BSD".  What
		about V7 and 3.0?  And we run a union of V6/V7.
		4.1 seemed to work
	3.	Source code written on 132 column terminal??
	4.	Mailit.c:  We are running the MMDF mail system
		and we have an intelligent mail sender (Send).
		I was able to throw out lots of code from mailit().
		It now calles send with the Subject line, and the
		name of a file to include if necessary.
	5.	makefile: the last couple of line which dealt with
		OBJECTS and HELPFILES caused my PDP11 "make" to
		run out of memory (Ray is on a VAX and didn't notice)
	6.	Rewrote "syncnews" as a Bourne shell script
	7.	The documentation did not print properly, pagination
		was all wrong.  No solution yet.
	8.	I fake ioctl TIOCGETP/TIOCSETP, but not TIOC[SG]ETN,
		my problem, just changed to SETP/GETP.
	9.	cursor.c:  Big problem here.  We are using the 2.8BSD
		termlib.a and it needs to have the "up" and "bc" for
		some terminals.  It uses these if the characters generated
		by a cursor control sequence would possibly be interpreted
		by the tty driver (NL, TAB, NULL, EOT).  I also rewrote
		the handling to allocation of space in here.
	10.	do "*[]?" work in the .nfseq files pointed at by the
		NFSEQ environment variable?
	11.	There should be a general notesfiles aliasing facility
		so that something like "long-notesfiles-name" can be
		aliased to "shortname".  I have talked to ray about
		this, and if he doesn't get to it, I will.
	12.	Having the erase/kill type characters hardcoded in
		is a pain.  We use the DEC standard set here (RUB, ^U)
		and do not allow the users to change it.
	13.	When you use E to change a note, it forces you to
		type in the title again, Why?
	14.	When using the built in pager to look at long
		notes, the percentage number in the corner bear
		no relation to reality.

	We are running Bnews2.7 and probably won't change to 2.9 for
a bit, just not enough time, but we are interested in work on interfacing
Notesfiles and Bnews.  There are still some reasons for keeping the
news system around.  Net.sources has the potential to have files larger
than 65535 characters and I not sure how to handle control messages.
What happens to news articles for which there is no notesfile.

	I will be glad to send anyone the changes I have made if
they are interested, or to the group if there is suitable interest.
Even with the problems I am still amazed at how easily it went in.

				Thank you Ray Essick!

				Doug Kingston
				Ballistic Research Laboratory
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