Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdahl!drivax!davison From: davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) Newsgroups: news.software.nn Subject: Re: sorting of subject line Message-ID: Date: 25 Jan 90 05:50:01 GMT References: <5201@hydra.gatech.EDU> Organization: Digital Research, Monterey CA Lines: 27 Joubert Berger (ccastjb@prism.gatech.EDU) wrote: } Nn is supposed to sort the subject lines. That works for me. Now after } all subjects have have been sorted and there are a few messages with the } the same subject heading, what does nn do? I sometimes find that I am reading } a reply to a message before I read the original message. Is this a bug, or } did I miss something[?] There are a few possibilities (besides the GMT dates being in error): Are the dates you are reading of the C news style? (with a leading day-of-the week? E.g. Wed, 24 Jan 90 23:59:59). If so, you need a fairly recently patched version of nn (patchlevel 6 works) to read the dates. Older versions parsed all such dates into zero, which sort in an arbitrary order. Another possibility is that someone changed the subject of the reply article to one that was alphabetically prior to the parent article. In this case you read the reply first because it is in a lower group alphabetically, and then read the parent article later on in the session. I sent some code to Kim Storm last November (or so) that corrects this problem by first sorting the articles into their subject groups (like the present method) and THEN sorts the groups by date of their first article. This way nn shows you the older articles first no matter what their subjects turn into. You can still see the alphabetical sort with the command ":sort subject". If people are interested, I could post the simple patch. -- Wayne Davison \ /| / /| \/ /| /(_) davison@drivax.UUCP (_)/ |/ /\| / / |/ \ ...!amdahl!drivax!davison