by This message announces the availability of xvnews release 2.3. xvnews
is a newsreader with an OpenLook GUI, written using the XView
toolkit. For those of you who want to go right ahead and pick it up,
here are the FTP sites:
ftp.twi.tudelft.nl:/pub/news/xvnews-2.3.tar.gz
(note that this site only allows a small number of ftp connections)
ftp.uu.net:/networking/news/readers/xvnews/xvnews-2.3.tar.gz
(and all sites which mirror those directories)
As an experiment I have also made available some information via WWW:
http://dutifp.twi.tudelft.nl:8000/xvnews/
A log of the changes since the release of the previous version 2.2.1
is appended below.
Changes 2.2.1 -> 2.3
--------------------
User-visibly changes
o The information in the header is displayed differently, and only
displays the newsgroup name when reading a particular group.
o "Next subject" now leaves the group when no unread articles remain,
like "Next unread".
o Added a "c" option to match case-sensitive kill-rules.
Patch by John Durand.
o The quit button is replced with a menu. This menu contains the
default action "done", which iconifies xvnews, and a "quit" option,
which quits xvnews. Both options update the .newsrc file. Partly
based on a patch by John Durand.
o When viewing groups the "goto group" button is only available when
exactly one group is selected. Reported by Stefan Keuhnel.
o Added patches by Alec Muffet to enhance the single newsgroup mode.
Made a number of changes to make using xvnews with just a single
group more consistent.
o When a 'Kill Subject' was done with a number of articles already read,
the next selected article would be the first article in the list,
instead of the next unread article. Reported by Andrew Tefft.
o Date: headers in articles are now converted to local time.
Patch by D. Douglas Valkenaar.
o The undelete popup doesn't pop up anymore. Use a new command line
option (-u) to get the old behaviour. Patch by D. Douglas Valkenaar.
o The name of the group is now listed in the header of window. Patch
by D. Douglas Valkenaar.
o The maximum rescan time is changed to 1440 minutes (24 hours). This
longer rescan time allows for better use with dialup
lines. Reported by Pete Delaney.
o The Organization: header is no also shown in the abbreviated header.
o Articles are now sorted in a more sane way, with replies following
the original article. Also, numerical subjects are sorted properly.
Bug-fixes
---------
o Imakefile should now work. Fixed mostly using Juergen Zimmermann's
patches, but mistakes remaining are mine.
o Rewrote the subject-sorting code, fixed some small bugs, and made
some speedups in the sort routine.
o When using an external editor the signature would always be
appended regardless of the compile-time ADD_SIGNATURE
option. Reported by Vidiot.
o If no Follow-Up: header is present the Newsgroups: header is
used. Includes code to reconnect to the server. Patch by Andrei
Arkhipov.
o Some of the properties are not written when they don't have a
value. Patch by Andrei Arkhipov.
o The article bookkeeping routines have been rewritten. This should
fix some odd crashes, and article renumbering problems.
o Fixed a number of problems related to using an external
editor. Reported by Vidiot.
- A '%' in a .signature would be parsed as a format-string for
printf, resulting in interesting random signatures. Could be
considered a feature, but removed nonetheless.
- The "-- " separator for the signature, and the reference line
would be missing
o Fixed some additional inconsistencies with inclusion of signatures.
ADD_SIGNATURE should now always result in the correct behaviour.
o When an article would be printed (indicated by [print]), it could
not be marked as unread anymore. Reported by Thomas Oliver.
o When USE_INEWS_TO_POST was defined, and an external editor was
used, xvnews would use the internal posting method anyway, instead
of inews as indicated. Fixed, reported by Mark McIntosh.
o Fixed a bug where the next group would disappear from the display
when the current group would be unsubscribed while reading its
articles. Reported by Mark Jackson.
o Fixed some bugs with the counting of unread articles.
o Fixed some problems with newsgroups with names of more than 70
characters. This still isn't fully fixed. See the TODO file.
o The "all articles" button would not show all articles in the
newsgroup. Fixed.
o A infinite loop could happen while killing articles in a group.
Patch by Alexander I. Murashkin.
Additional functionality
------------------------
o xvnews now uses the LIST SUBSCRIPTIONS NNTP command to find the default
subscription when no .newsrc is present. Patch by Dave Hill.
o xvnews now uses the XGTITLE NNTP command. This command isn't
standard, but it is present with INN. This conserves both memory
and time, as descriptions of newsgroups are only read when
needed. LIST NEWSGROUPS will be used as a backup. Patches by Leif
Hedstrom.
o Support for LOCALE has been added. Default locale can be defined in
config.h. Patch by Andrei Arkhipov.
o Added support for handling of the nnrp passwd mechanism used by
INN. See comments in config.h. Patch by D. Douglas Valkenaar
o A new environment variable MAIL_ALIAS can be used to set the mail
alias in postings and e-mail. This can be used to use an alias
instead of a login name (which might be mandatory within a
company), or it can be used to add additional system names, as
happens with a number of Xerox machines.
Other
-----
o The CHANGES file is now rewritten in a better format (I hope)
o Changed put_server routine to use variable number of
arguments. This make the code cleaner, and gets rid of a number of
static buffers within the program.
o To enhance portability the regular expression code has been rewritten.
xvnews now uses internal routines, so that all portability dependencies
are contained within one file: xv_regex.c.
o Ported to FreeBSD, with help from James Robinson.
o Added a patch by Doug Shuck, which streamlined several things when
doing follow-ups.
o Made several speed-ups to the kill-file code, patch by Andrew
Tefft.
o A define has been added to keep the article window editable. Patch
by Bertrand Decouty.
--
Delft University of Technology Department of Information Systems
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
<a href=http://www.twi.tudelft.nl/People/J.J.deGraaff.html>WWW link</a>
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