[3050] in SIPB bug reports
$NEWSRC for newsreaders
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark)
Thu Jul 16 20:28:02 1992
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 20:27:38 -0400
From: Calvin Clark <ckclark@mit.edu>
To: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: belville@Athena.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: ckclark@mit.edu
I think that all of the newsreaders in the sipb locker should read the
$NEWSRC environment variable, so that users can use it to override the
default location of ~/.newsrc. I have made this modification for gnus,
and it seems to work fine. I tried setting $NEWSRC to
~/private/.newsrc, and it used that file, and put the .newsrc.el file
~/private as well, which is the right thing (TM).
xrn supports resources and command line options for this (newsrcFile and
saveNewsrcFile for the files which are usually ~/.newsrc and
~/.oldnewsrc, respectively.) A small patch to resources.c for the xrn
code would facilitate this. I could make this change myself, but it is
not obvious when the right thing to do is in this case, because xrn has
*separate* resources for the two files. I think that a reasonable
algorithm in this case would be:
-- The newsrcFile resource should override $NEWSRC
-- If newsrcFile is not set, use $NEWSRC for the newsrcFile,
and use saveNewsFile for the backup. If saveNewsrcFile
is not set, use .oldnewsrc in the same directory newsrcFile
or $NEWSRC is in.
The separate options make this more complex. Ideas?
Last, but not least:
rn/rrn has a SERIOUS bug: if you try to set $NEWSRC, it will remove the
file pointed to by $NEWSRC when you quit reading news. I'm looking at
this bug now, and hope to have a fix soon.
-Calvin
