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From: chip@t4test.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Overhelpfulness in 2.10.2
Message-ID: <1169@t4test.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Oct-84 21:19:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: t4test.1169
Posted: Fri Oct 19 21:19:22 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Oct-84 14:59:24 EDT
References: <890@opus.UUCP> <140@geowhiz.UUCP>
Distribution: net.all
Organization: Intel, Santa Clara, Ca.
Lines: 56
Summary: the author comments

A little history on the current postnews.  I'm not sure who is
responsible for the 2.10.2 distribution of postnews; Rick Adams might
know.  However, it is very much based on a version I sent to
net.sources several months ago.  My version was a quick hack on the
postnews.c Mark Horton posted, and retains much of his structure,
ideas and features.

As I have seen, three features have been questioned:
  1)  *** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** 
  2)  Including original articles in a followup with '>' marks.  
  3)  Saving articles with the NEWSARCHIVE feature.

The "REPLACE THIS" line was in Mark's original version.  I liked it and
carried it over.  One of my design goals was to minimize errors by
novice users, while trying to minimize the junk an experienced user
must trudge through.  I hear and understand your complaints.  I will
probably remove this from a future release, and use some other method
of making a novice user understand what to do when s/he suddenly finds
her/himself dumped into an editor.

I agree with the gripes behind the second point.  That is why I have
added a '-f' flag to surpress the original article in a followup.
Also, a '-m' flag may define what mark you want.  Including the
original article in a followup is an important feature.  It should
remain there, but a method for getting around it (other than deleting
lines in the editor) should also be available.  I don't know how to
incorporate these flags into 'readnews' and 'vnews'.  I haven't looked
at it because we use 'rn', and adding them was very straightforward.
(It did require a small change to the source and common.h).

I have found the NEWSARCHIVE save feature to be a great help.  This
came originally from my "archive" program (also posted to net.sources a
while back) which saved articles from readnews.  This allowed the user
to have an archive directory with all saved articles and copies of
posted articles.  I haven't looked at the 2.10.2 postnews, but in the
original undefining NEWSARCHIVE would surpress the saving.  I strongly
suggest not turning off the "A copy has been appended to..." message.
Several times I have run postnews from a non-login shell, so .cshrc
hadn't been run.  The lack of this message warned me that I didn't have
a copy automatically made for me.  (Maybe this is an issue only on
Eunice sites, where it is nice to sometimes open up a shell without
getting an environment defined.  But since we are running Eunice I am
obviously going to try to put in features which I find helpful.  Of
course I will try to keep them from being a nuisance for those folks
with more normal Unix installations.)

So, where do we go from here?  I am working on a new version of
postnews (and some other news stuff).  I expect to complete it
shortly.  I will keep these suggestions, as well as other ones people
might have, in mind.  Once completed, I will send out a request for
test sites.  Once verified, I would like to see it distributed.
Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.
-- 

Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara
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