Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News readnews status ?
Message-ID: <1990Oct3.191555.29976@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Oct3.004953.9387@robobar.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 90 19:15:55 GMT

In article <1990Oct3.004953.9387@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>Could you say what you consider to be the future of the included
>newsreader ? ...

It needs to be there, partly for the sake of completeness and partly for
the benefit of people who want to use news as a way of supplementing motd
for seriously naive users.  (Readers like rn are awfully intimidating to
such people.)  In its future -- someday -- are better ties to our setup
and configuration stuff, and probably an effort to strip out unused
features and improve portability.  Be warned that this is not a high
priority with us at present.

>Presumably it has already diverged sufficiently from the UNSW news package
>that backwards compatibility with UNSW is no longer of major concern?

Correct.

>The stated main problem (lack of pure USG support) doesn't *seem* to be a
>problem -- (though I haven't tested it on a pure USG yet but I will)
>it works _almost_ perfectly if you stick the sgttyb declaration into the
>#ifdef and compile WITHOUT any terminal ioctls at all -- I actually
>prefer it this way -- leaves no chance of screwing up the tty settings :-)

I'm inclined to agree that it has no real need to mess with the tty stuff
and should probably be fixed not to.  That would improve portability
considerably too.

>	1) readnews expects postnews to handle some weird arguments for
>	   followups (which it doesn't :-).
>	2) The mail reply addresses are total rubbish. 
>	3) cancellation (if postnews worked :-) is a bit abrupt ...

The posting and replying interface definitely needs work.  We haven't
run into this much because our users tend to graduate to rn once they
stop being passive observers, but it's a valid point.

>	5) reading the .newsrc isn't done with fgetmfs :-(

Reading of the .newsrc is another area that definitely needs work!

>I'd like to know if a) anyone else has done it b) whether anyone else is
>GOING to do it c) what the C News authors would like to happen d) what
>others would like to see happen...

I don't know of anyone who's pursued it.  Personally, we'd be happy to
see someone competent clean the thing up; we don't really have time to
deal with its rough edges just now.
-- 
Imagine life with OS/360 the standard  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
operating system.  Now think about X.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry