[1286] in linux-announce channel archive
XRN (X news reader) 8.00 released
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lars Wirzenius)
Mon Nov 6 07:09:32 1995
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 1995 21:22:31 +0200
From: Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cc.helsinki.fi>
To: linux-announce@vger.rutgers.edu
Reply-To: linux-announce-owner@vger.rutgers.edu
From: jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: XRN (X news reader) 8.00 released
Followup-to: news.software.readers
Organization: OpenVision Technologies, Inc.
Reply-To: bug-xrn@cam.ov.com
Keywords: X, Usenet, News
Approved: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov (Lars Wirzenius)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
[NOTE: Because comp.os.linux.announce and comp.windows.x.announce are
moderated and articles in them are approved separately, I have to post
this message three separate times -- once to comp.os.linux.announce,
once to comp.windows.x.announce, and once to both comp.windows.x.apps
and news.software.readers. I apologize if you see the message more
than once.]
Version 8.00 of XRN, an X news reader, has been released. This
release contains numerous bug fixes as well as significant new
functionality (which is discussed in greater detail below). All users
of previous versions of XRN are encouraged to update to this version.
Source code for this version of XRN is available in the following
locations:
<URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xrn/xrn-8.00.tgz>
<URL:ftp://ftp.cam.ov.com/pub/xrn/xrn.tgz>
A patch file from release 7.03 to release 8.00, in unidiff format and
compressed with GNU zip (uncompressed, it is larger than the source
distribution), is available in the following locations:
<URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xrn/xrn-7.03-8.00.patch.gz>
<URL:ftp://ftp.cam.ov.com/pub/xrn/7.03-8.00.patch.gz>
Source code should also soon be available in comp.sources.x. A binary
distribution for Linux is available in the following locations:
<URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xrn/xrn-linux.tgz>
<URL:ftp://ftp.cam.ov.com/pub/xrn/xrn-linux.tgz>
(These files and the ".tgz" files listed above are GNU tar files
compressed with GNU zip.)
Below, you will find a list of major enhancements, functionality
changes and bug fixes in this release, extracted from the ChangeLog
file in the source distribution. Following that list is the Linux
Software Map (LSM) entry for the Linux binary distribution of XRN
8.00.
As with previous XRN releases, I am indebted to the members of the
xrn-users@cam.ov.com mailing list (see the README file in the
distribution for information about joining the list) who have tested
the many pre-release versions of XRN 8.00 and helped me by finding
bugs, providing bug fixes, making suggestions and providing other
useful feedback. Thanks!
*************************
Thu Nov 2 21:25:22 1995 Jonathan Kamens <jik@annex-1-slip-jik.cam.ov.com>
*** Significant user-visible changes in XRN 8.00:
** Major enhancements:
* XRN no longer needs to read the entire newsgroup list from
the NNTP server each time it starts up and each time the user
requests a rescan. Instead, if the "cacheActive" option is
true, the complete newsgroup list is retrieved only when XRN
determines that the active-file cache is missing information
(e.g., the first time the user runs XRN when cacheActive is
true, or when cacheActive is true and the user asks to go to a
newsgroup that XRN doesn't know about) or when the user
explicitly tells XRN to retrieve the entire list (with the
"ngGetList" command in Newsgroup mode).
When the user issues the "ngRescan" command when "cacheActive"
is true, XRN does the rescan by querying the server explicitly
about each subscribed newsgroup (and by using the NNTP
NEWGROUPS command to ask the server if there are any new
newsgroups), rather than by retrieving a complete newsgroup
list. Furthermore, since each group's query is independent of
the others, the queries occur in the background and the user
can actively read news while they are occurring.
This functionality will probably be used most frequently by
people reading news over a slow SLIP or PPP link who don't
want to download a complete newsgroup list every time they
check for new articles. However, the fact that rescanning
happens in the background when "cacheActive" is true may make
this feature useful even to users with fast network
connections.
* XRN no longer needs all available newsgroups to be listed in
the user's .newsrc file. If the new "fullNewsrc" option is
set to false (it is true by default, so XRN's old behavior
remains the default), then only the newsgroups that the user
wishes to list in the .newsrc file will be stored there. The
user can remove a newsgroup from the .newsrc by editing it
outside of XRN in a text editor, or by setting the newsgroup's
status to "ignored" in All mode. When "fullNewsrc" is false,
XRN can no longer use the contents of the .newsrc to determine
when new newsgroups are created, so it instead uses the NNTP
NEWGROUPS command to query the server about new groups.
* Some sections of the man page have been reorganized or
rewritten for increased clarity, and new sections dealing
specifically with composing messages and with the format of
KILL files (suggested by uri@watson.ibm.com) have been added.
* Commands have been added to Article, All and Newsgroup modes
to allow the user to both post and mail a single message or to
just mail a message.
* New functionality has been added to make it possible to move
around in the subject list in Article mode without the
displayed article following the subject cursor. For the most
part, this change will be transparent to people who don't want
to use this functionality. However, the one non-transparent
aspect of it is that the up and down arrows no longer display
the next and previous article; instead, they move the cursor
without changing the displayed article. The 'P' and 'N' keys
retain the behavior which used to be bound to the arrow keys
as well. Users who prefer the old behavior can restore it by
putting the following in their X resources:
xrn*artFrame.subjects.translations: #override \n\
~Meta<Key>Up: artPrev() \n\
~Meta<Key>Down: artNext() \n
For more information about this new functionality, see the
documentation about it near the beginning of the "ARTICLE
MODE" section of the man page.
** Changes in functionality:
* In previous releases of XRN, all modes used the same widgets
to display data in -- the top text window, info line, and
button box, and the bottom text window, info line, and button
box. This structure took advantage of available screen real
estate poorly (why should part of the XRN window be blank and
unused in all modes except article mode?) and made code
maintenance difficult. The code has therefore been
reorganized so that each mode has its own "Paned" widget which
fills the entire XRN window when the mode is active. There
are probably numerous little user-visible aspects of this
change, but the big ones are:
(1) Screen real estate is utilized more fully -- for example,
in newsgroup mode, there's no longer a bottom text window,
info line or button box, which means that many more newsgroups
can be listed in the same space.
(2) The "Bindings" resources and command-line options have
been removed. Instead, users should use the "translations"
resources for the various modes in order to set bindings. The
correct resource to use for customizing each mode's
translations is given in the documentation for that mode in
the man page.
(3) Because each mode uses separate widgets, it is now
possible to customize the appearance of modes separately --
for example, you can use different fonts for the newsgroup or
article lists in different modes.
(4) Because the widget hierarchy has changed, the names of
some widgets have changed, and therefore some user X resources
which refer to those widgets might no longer work. See the
XRN source code or the application-defaults file to find out
the new names of the various widgets.
(5) The primary button box now changes locations depending on
which mode XRN is in. I've had some feedback from users who
do not like this particular aspect of this change; I am
contemplating addressing their complaints in the next release
by adding an option which will reorder the widgets from top to
bottom so that they are displayed "button box, info line, text
widget", instead of "text widget, info line, button box", so
that the button box will always be on top of the window and
therefore will never move.
* The "extraMailHeaders" option has been removed. The
behavior which was previously available only by setting it to
true now occurs all the time. This behavior is to add
"X-Newsgroups" and "In-reply-to" lines to mailed replies,
indicating the "Newsgroups" line and the message ID of the
posting being replied to. However, the "X-Newsgroups" and
"In-reply-to" lines are no longer included in followups that
are also being mailed, because they're redundant in that
context (since the message contains "Newsgroups" and
"References" lines).
* Key bindings for all commands have been added, and all key
bindings have been documented in the man page.
* Two new commands ("allNext" and "allPrev") have been added
in All mode, for moving the cursor to the next or previous
newsgroup.
* Default buttons lists which do not contain all available
buttons have been added. In previous releases of XRN, the
default button lists for all modes contained all available
buttons. However, the number of available buttons has been
steadily increasing, and many of them are not used by most
people, so it is unnecessary for them to be taking up space in
the default configuration. Of course, users can still
configure their own personal button lists to contain whatever
buttons they list, and all commands are available through
their key bindings even if they are not available as buttons.
* XRN's title-bar functionality has been removed. Title bars
are the responsibility of the window manager, not of XRN.
* XRN now checks for an empty "Subject" field and requires the
user to fill it in if it is empty, whether or not INN is being
used. Previously, this check occurred only when INN was being
used.
* More characters have been added to the list of characters
that may be special according to some regular-expression
libraries and that therefore should be quoted by enclosing
them in square braces when placing entries into KILL files.
* When the signature file is too big to be included in a
followup or reply, XRN will not display an error instead of
ignoring it silently, so that the user knows why it was
ignored. This change was suggested by Harald Leinders
<hl@arthur.ph2.Uni-Koeln.DE>.
* A cancel button has been added to the "List old" command in
Article mode, as suggested by George Ross <gdmr@dcs.ed.ac.uk>.
It's not possible to do this really well until the NNTP code
in XRN is multi-threaded or interrupt-driven, but in the
meantime, this button allows the "List old" to be aborted one
third or two third of the way through its work.
* XRN will no longer let the user quit or exit while a
composition is pending (the user must abort or send the
message being composed before quitting).
* As suggested by wilker@math.purdue.edu (Clarence
W. Wilkerson), it is now possible to disable an external
editor command specified in X resources or in the app-defaults
file by specifying an empty-string value for the
"editorCommand" option (in other words, an empty
"editorCommand" is now the same as if it had not been
specified at all).
* When XRN creates a new RMAIL file to save a message in it,
it now puts "-*- rmail -*-" on the first line of the file,
just like recent versions of Emacs do, so that the file can be
loaded into Emacs with C-x C-f and will automatically go into
RMAIL mode.
** Bug fixes:
* When including an article in a followup or reply, the
inclusion prefix was being inserted in the middle of lines
longer than 256 characters, rather than being inserted only at
line beginnings. Also, in some cases, part of the header was
being be included in the followup or reply, even when the
"includeHeader" option was false.
* Several minor memory leaks, temporary-file leaks and
file-descriptor leaks.
* Several instances in which a small amount of unnecessary
traffic with the NNTP server was occurring.
* Some minor non-portability problems which were preventing
XRN from compiling (or compiling cleanly) on some platforms.
* When there were new groups to be added to the .newsrc and
the user selected "Add after group" and specified a
nonexistent newsgroup in the dialog box, XRN ignored the
problem and pretended that the group was added to the .newsrc,
when in fact it wasn't, which made it come up as a new group
again the next time the user ran XRN. (reported by
philippe@pablo.physics.lsa.umich.edu (Philippe Brieu))
* When the "MODE READER" command was sent to the NNTP server
when connecting to it, XRN wasn't detecting when the server
returned an access-denied error and aborting; instead, it was
looping forever, disconnecting from and reconnecting to the
server repeatedly.
* Some of the German button labels and message strings were
incorrect. (fixes by foks@iatge.de (Thomas Foks) and audited
by kay@zhv.basf-ag.de (Kay Marquardt) (There are still some
English label strings in the German labels, because I can't
translate them myself since I don't know German, and noone who
knows German has sent me translations for them. Feel free to
send me translations for them if you know German.)
* The German message that is displayed when the app-defaults
file is missing was incorrect and was causing a core-dump.
* XRN was core-dumping when parsing "From" lines in articles
when the "authorFullName" option was false. (fix by "David
A. Curry" <davy@ecn.purdue.edu>)
* On Linux, XRN was processing KILL files very slowly and
coredumping when processing KILL files in some cases because
of bugs in libc's regular-expression routines. (see README and
README.Linux for more information)
* XRN was coredumping when it encountered an error writing to
a temporary file while trying to retrieve an article from the
server.
* Users that started XRN without a .newsrc file weren't seeing
unread articles in news.announce.newusers (or whatever
NEWUSER_GROUPS was set to) after startup, until after they
executed a rescan, and if they exited from XRN immediately
after it created their .newsrc without doing a rescan, it
marked all of the articles in news.announce.newusers read.
(reported by Michael Schmitz <schmitz@ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE>)
* The "Cancel search" button wasn't popping up immediately at
the start of the search, and in some cases it was popping up
and then being deleted by XRN before it could be placed by the
window manager, which caused the window manager to put up a
button outline and require the user to place the outline, even
though there was no longer actually a button associated with
it.
* XRN was attempting to pop up a confirmation box after an X
IO error has occurred; on some systems, this was causing XRN
to go into an infinite loop and consume resources after the
user had logged out (or killed his X session, or killed
XRN). (reported by George Ross <gdmr@dcs.ed.ac.uk>).
* Additional bug fixes or bug reports which led to fixes were
provided by: from philippe@pablo.physics.lsa.umich.edu
(Philippe Brieu), dyson@sunfish.physics.uiowa.edu (Richard
L. Dyson), Jean-Marc.Lasgouttes@inria.fr (Jean-Marc
Lasgouttes), nissen@montefiore.ulg.ac.be (Alain Nissen),
pawliger@mv.us.adobe.com (Marc Pawliger), "Ivar Ruyter"
<ivarr@troll.hz.kfa-juelich.de>, "David W. Schuler"
<dschuler@VNET.IBM.COM>, Masahiko Suenaga
<f77266a@kyu-cc.cc.kyushu-u.ac.jp>, Tim <tda10@cus.cam.ac.uk>,
Rein Tollevik <Rein.Tollevik@si.sintef.no>, Chris Torek
<torek@purr.bsdi.com>.
*************************
Begin3
Title: xrn-linux
Version: 8.00
Entered-date: 05NOV95
Description: X news reader
Keywords: X, Usenet, News
Author: jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan Kamens), Ellen Santovich,
Rick Spickelmier
Maintained-by: jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan Kamens)
Primary-site: ftp.cam.ov.com /pub/xrn
127874 xrn-linux.tgz
1k xrn-linux.lsm
Alternate-site: ftp.x.org /contrib/applications/xrn
Original-site: ftp.cam.ov.com /pub/xrn
281433 8.00.tgz
Platforms: XFree86 3.1.2 (ELF), libc 5.0.9
Copying-policy: BSD
End
- --
Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@cam.ov.com
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