Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!rutgers!mtune!codas!cpsc6a!rtech!bobm From: bobm@rtech.UUCP (Bob Mcqueer) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: vn update Message-ID: <1094@rtech.UUCP> Date: Sun, 26-Jul-87 16:46:03 EDT Article-I.D.: rtech.1094 Posted: Sun Jul 26 16:46:03 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 28-Jul-87 01:47:57 EDT Organization: Relational Technology Inc. Alameda, CA 94501 Lines: 55 Every few weeks I get evidence that vn is out there at sites other than ours happily rooting through articles. Once I got curious and scanned our spool directories for followups which seemed to have been posted from vn (you see, there's a REASON for having different wording on the introductory line), and found articles from about 50 sites over a 1 week period, which comprised about 2% of the total followups posted. Not a huge amount, but significant I think, especially as the program seems to be favored by the "passive" or "casual" audience that reads & never posts. I've modified vn a good bit internally with the intention of allowing it to talk to such things as NNTP servers, databases & so on. I would like to post this as a new version, which I am "soaking" here a rtech right now. In addition to formalizing the interface for talking to servers, and incorporating a couple bug fixes, a few minor enhancements will show at the interface: 1 Saving articles has some enhancements for editing the old savefile name, creating individual directories for newsgroups, overwriting instead of appending, etc. It also works a bit faster (get rid of that silly business of forking a cat) A few other strings such as pattern strings are saved for editing the old copy, rather than prompting for a new one each time, also. 2 All shell variables used which don't begin with "VN" (such as PS1) may be overridden by using VN instead. I'm using this to define VNEDITOR as a script which invokes ispell after vi, and not having it conflict with the EDITOR variable for ksh. 3 Commands for Top / Bottom / Middle of page 4 Takes care of updating .newsrc with a "read" number reflecting removed articles. Will prevent accumulating those newsgroup scanning messages on newsgroups with nothing in them - speeds things up a bit, too. Will help if your administrators do like ours and simply remove articles from the spool directories when space gets tight. I also allowed it to be compiled to collect some logs, a feature which I hope is used only for tuning purposes, and is not put to obnoxious uses. Given the current division of the source newsgroups, I'm once again wondering where to post the thing. comp.sources.unix? comp.sources.misc? If there's a consensus, I'll follow it. I'll post the new version in a couple weeks. I'm following with another article which describes the server interface routines to tie vn to an arbitrary news server, for the interested parties. The next order of business would be to provide NNTP'ed versions of the server interface routines. If somebody wants to help with that, I'm interested. -- Bob McQueer {amdahl, sun, mtxinu, hoptoad, cpsc6a}!rtech!bobm