Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: C News and readnews
Message-ID: <256CE0EB.2F3A@rpi.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 89 06:34:19 GMT
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 29

Would anyone who has gotten the "rna" readnews which comes with C News
to work please contact me via e-mail.  I've finally tried to put it
together for the sake of one of my users who wants to use it in a
non-interactive script for batch processing of some articles (he used
to use the old readnews back when we had B News).

I edited defs.h and the Makefile.  It compiled fine but ended up core
dumping in getline() in newsrc.c.  I fixed that by making it also
check whether the character which it getc()'ed was a newline; where it
had dumped core was trying to parse a line of "news.announce.newgroups:"
which newsetup would produce as default -- the lack of trailing space
made it create one _huge_ "word" of all the groups in the file.

Now it doesn't core dump, but it doesn't give me any news either.  Oh
wait, it does dump still -- "readnews -s+ some.group" dies in subsub()
because slist is a nil pointer.  "readnews -n rpi.news" will mark all
articles as read for the group but won't show any.

I haven't seen any bug reports about it, so I am really curious what
my problem is.  Is it just that no one bothers with this?  Or is that
black cat that crossed my path as I walked under a ladder yesterday
really having an affect on my life?

Pretty common system configuration: SunOS 4.0.3, Sun 3/280.  The C
News is current through the November patch.

Dave
-- 
 (setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))