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From: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Reading cross-posted messages
Message-ID: <4183@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Feb-87 14:50:57 EST
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.4183
Posted: Mon Feb 23 14:50:57 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Feb-87 19:51:36 EST
References: <646@pedsgo.UUCP> <1523@nicmad.UUCP> <4164@sdcrdcf.UUCP> <658@pedsgo.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Organization: Unisys - System Development Group, Santa Monica
Lines: 75

In article <646@pedsgo.UUCP> evan@pedsgo.UUCP wrote:
< Also, when reading, if I post a followup to a message, that message does
< not get marked as read until I go back and reread it.  This is annoying.

In article <1523@nicmad.UUCP> brown@nicmad.UUCP (Mr. Video) concurred:
> Ya, I have noticed that too.  Maybe Larry should consider this a bug and
> send out a patch for it.  For now we are just going to have to look
> at it again to get it marked.

In article <4164@sdcrdcf.UUCP> I (Larry Wall) said:
> This has been considered before.  The conventional wisdom seems to be that
> you don't have any business posting a followup to an article you haven't read.

In article <658@pedsgo.UUCP> evan@pedsgo.UUCP (Evan Marcus) writes:
> Huh?  If I followup to an article, it's because I read it (of course!).
> The problem I have is that after I do, and then Followup to it, the article
> is still marked unread! (I posted the original question.)  I agree, you
> don't have any business followingup to an article you haven't read; why
> would anybody want to do this?????  And, what has that got to do with my
> question?

It's just that most of the people who have complained to me over the years
about followup not marking articles read have not really read the whole
article.  Attribute my remarks to a lousy past life.  :-)  I didn't interpret
your use of the word "reread" as meaning you'd read the *entire* article before.
Sorry.

I'll explain how it supposedly works currently, and then we'll see if we have
a real bug.  We might well have a bug--I'm going into detail here not because
I think you folks are incompetent, but because I want to avoid the possibility
of misunderstanding, and lay things out straight for those who are listening
in and may also be running into this problem.

First of all, the followup command itself does not currently mark an article
as either read or unread, but relies instead on the normal marking mechanism,
as follows.

The article is marked as read just after the last line of the article
has been displayed, but just before the "End of article" line.  If the last
line is not displayed, then the article is at the mercy of whatever command
took it to the "End of article" prompt to do the appropropriate marking.  
Since 'f' does not mark articles as read, typing 'f' to the MORE prompt
*never* marks as read, even if you are in the signature, or stopped at the "-- "
line before the signature because you have the PAGESTOP variable set.

If you are reading the last line, then you are definitely getting the article
marked as read, or rn wouldn't be working for you at all.  Rn can't foretell
the future, and doesn't know you are going to be typing an 'f'.  Therefore
the bug, assuming that there is one, would have to involve the followup command
actively marking the article as unread, or at least somehow causing rn to
forget that it just marked it as read.  I must confess I'm at a loss to see
how that could happen, unless perhaps you already had a macro bound to the
followup command.  Other than that it would have to be something kinda freaky.
Maybe I'm not seeing something obvious...

How many of you can reproduce this?

(Actually, this article is a test to see if I can reproduce it!)

Does the reply command or any other command have the same problem?  What kind
of a system are you on?

If the 'f' command is somehow marking your old article as unread, then the

f	jf
F	jF

macros I mentioned shouldn't work right either.

Oh, by the way, some people are also concerned about seeing the article you
just posted.  The only solution (currently) to that is to put yourself in
your own KILL file.

Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall