[1175] in SIPB bug reports
GRIPE about XRN 6.9 (for X11R4)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Tue Jul 31 13:45:21 1990
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 90 13:44:45 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: hindmost@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: hindmost@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Mon, 25 Jun 90 09:49:08 -0400 <9006251349.AA21741@M11-116-4.MIT.EDU>
From: hindmost@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 90 09:49:08 -0400
xrn doesn't save _any_ information while it's running
(about subscriptions/unsubscriptions/read articles, etc.)
My xrn just died with a malloc error (presumably due
to the memory leak), and now all the groups I unsubscribed
to/read are back... If this had happened in rn, then
only the last newsgroup read would be corrupted.
(First of all, sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your mail,
but I've been very busy.)
Note that we're now running xrn version 6.10, and I suspect we'll be
running 6.11 before the term starts. Both of these versions offer
several improvements over 6.9.
In any case, at least in 6.10, state will be preserved when xrn exits
abnormally, so this first complaint of yours is no longer applicable.
Incidentally, xrn has some wrong behavior:
- ^N and ^P go to read messages as well
Well, according to man page for xrn, this is the documented correct
behavior. Whether or not it is how things "should" work is debatable,
but I'm not going to change things unless the author decides to. I'll
suggest it to him.
- If I hit ^N and there are no articles with that
topic left, it goes to the article right after
the one I first hit ^N from. Whether or not
it's been read already is ignored.
This appears to be fixed in 6.10.
- <Space> doesn't mean ^N in this case; instead,
it's N again, even though I haven't hit N!
This is annoying, since I have to think about
whether or not I can just hit <Space>, or
if I have to hit ^N yet again.
As far as I can tell, space *never* means ^N. That, too, is something
that's up to the author to change; once again, I'll suggest it to him.
Alternatively, you can probably get away with changing it yourself, by
playing with application resources to change the bindings in some way.
Let me know if you want more details....
I think there are a bunch of other unuseful things, but
there may be valid reasons why they differ from rn
(perhaps different ways to do things).
We can't respond to 'em if you don't report 'em :-)
Jonathan Kamens USnail:
MIT Project Athena 11 Ashford Terrace
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU Allston, MA 02134
Office: 617-253-8495 Home: 617-782-0710
