[3051] in SIPB bug reports
Re: $NEWSRC for newsreaders
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark)
Fri Jul 17 02:40:28 1992
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 02:39:55 -0400
From: Calvin Clark <ckclark@mit.edu>
To: Calvin Clark <ckclark@mit.edu>
Cc: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU, belville@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [3050]
Reply-To: ckclark@mit.edu
>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.
Fixed. The problem was that rn was trying to create hard links across
directories, which doesn't work in AFS. It wasn't checking to see if it
was succeeding. The solution I picked was to make it do a copy if a
link is not possible, and a move if a rename is not possible.
Sharon:
Rn uses a number of configuration files, and it will read an
environment variable for the directory in which these files are to be
stored. Setting $NEWSRC will only change the location of the .newsrc
file. However, setting $DOTDIR will cause rn to look in the directory
$DOTDIR for all of rn's dotfiles (.newsrc, .oldnewsrc, .rnsoft, .rnlast,
etc.), so, in the case of rn, it is better to set $DOTDIR. For example:
setenv DOTDIR ~/Private
can be used by an rn user to make all the news dotfiles private.
However, $DOTDIR is not read by other newsreaders. If and when xrn gets
modified to read $NEWSRC, something like this should cover all of the
newsreaders available in the sipb locker:
setenv NEWSRC ~/Private/.newsrc
setenv DOTDIR ~/Private
-Calvin
