Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site t4test.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!sdcsvax!dcdwest!ittvax!decvax!decwrl!amd!dual!qantel!intelca!t4test!chip 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 { idi|intelca|icalqa|kremvax|qubix|ucscc } ! t4test ! { chip|news }