NEWSRDR V2.7, 09-JAN-1991 ** NOTE ** * * To accommodate the changes in this release, the format of the NEWSRDR * profile has changed. Your profile will be converted automatically the * first time you invoke this version of NEWSRDR. You can use an older * version of NEWSRDR with a new-format profile, but you will lose your * SET REPLY settings and the newer settings of SET SIGNATURE. * ********** BUG FIXES AND UPDATES --------------------- NEWSRDR V2.7, 09-JAN-1991 * Additional bang-format address support. * The DIRECTORY command now formats its output based on terminal width. You can modify the format with the /WIDTH qualifier. * A READ/SUBJECT command has been added, for reading articles matching one or more wildcard patterns. Check the documentation for further information on use of this command. * A /TO qualifier has been added to the REPLY command for directing mailed replies. * The POST, MAIL, FORWARD, and REPLY commands now provide more information about where the message is being sent before asking for final confirmation. * You can now define the default REPLY behaviour (post, mail, or both) with the SET REPLY command. * You can now select whether your signature file is included automatically on mail, postings, or both, using SET SIGNATURE. * You can specify your own Reply-To address by defining the logical name NEWSRDR_REPLY_TO. * Time zones are now handled differently. All Date headers in articles are done in GMT time, rather than local time. * A username-to-mailname conversion routine can now be specified for the system, for those sites whose network mail systems do not use the VMS username for addressing local mail. * Changes have been made to accommodate the captive/restricted account changes in VMS V5.2 or later. NEWSRDR V2.6-1, 19-NOV-1990 * NEWS_*.TMP files weren't getting cleaned up on exit due to restructuring done in last revision. NEWSRDR V2.6, 13-NOV-1990 * Added documentation and help info for SET SEEN/ALL. * Added documentation on setting up time zones for use with NEWSRDR. * Improvements were made in the way the temporary files holding article text are handled, to reduce the extra network traffic that used to be incurred when the current article was being redisplayed or extracted. * A sample startup command procedure for NEWSRDR is now provided as part of the package. * /PARENT is now the default for the ATTACH command. NEWSRDR V2.5, 12-NOV-1990 * Added hooks for site-provided character conversion routines, mainly for use by Japanese sites that need to convert between their network Kanji representation and the DEC Kanji representation. Conversion is performed only on text in the body of an article, at retrieval and posting times. * Added optional bang-path address formatting, for those sites whose news servers cannot handle RFC822-type addressing. NEWSRDR V2.4, 28-JUN-1990 * Spawned editors are now supported. SET EDIT/EDITOR has been modified to accommodate both callable and spawned editors. * UPDATE now disconnects from and reconnects to the server before performing an update. Some, if not all, NNTP servers only update group information at the beginning of a session. NEWSRDR V2.3-1, 12-JUN-1990 * Under certain circumstances when UPDATE/FULL was used, a subsequent READ/NEW or READ/NEXT/NEW would cause an infinite loop. This has been fixed. NEWSRDR V2.3, 23-MAY-1990 * READ/PREVIOUS has been added, to go backwards through articles in a newsgroup. * The screen is no longer cleared when NEWSRDR starts up and when control returns to NEWSRDR after a SPAWN command. This allows the output from a spawned command to be retained on the screen. * The first entry in a DIRECTORY listing would always be marked as seen, even if the article had not yet been seen. This has been fixed. * The NEWSRDR documentation has been updated to reflect the changes made since V2.0 of the software. * Both EDT and TPU (and probably LSE) create their journal files in the current default directory. When your default is set to a directory to which you do not have write access, TPU complains and does not create its journal file, but EDT signals a fatal error, which causes NEWSRDR to exit abnormally. NEWSRDR now includes a work-around that checks to see if the editor name is "EDT". If it is, it uses a different calling sequence, redirecting the journal file to the SYS$SCRATCH directory. * After displaying a one-page article with CURRENT, an extra RETURN would have to be pressed to continue reading articles. This has been fixed. * The code that remove non-printable characters from screen output has been fixed. NEWSRDR V2.2-9, 29-MAR-1990 * VMS/ULTRIX Connection V1.2 is now supported as an NNTP transport. There are now two versions of the SERVER module, one for use with CMU and one for use with UCX. NEWSRDR V2.2-8, 01-MAR-1990 * Replaced SMG with $QIO's for output, except for screen clears. This results in improved input handling since input can now exceed screen width. * Fixed problem where keypad definitions and recall buffer were going away after spawns and edit sessions. * Fixed some qualifier bugs. * Added FORWARD command to allow articles to be forwarded by mail to another user. * NEWSRDR now fetches the copy-to-self attributes from the VMS MAIL profile and applies them to mailed messages. SEND, REPLY/MAIL, and FORWARD commands now take /[NO]SELF qualifier to override the profile setting. * Doing an UPDATE after an UPDATE/FULL would cause NEWSRDR to ask the server about every group in the local group list, even if you weren't subscribed to it. This has been fixed. * UPDATE/FULL was not correctly handling group names with special characters in them (like "+"). This has been fixed. * POST, FORWARD, REPLY, and MAIL now correctly handle the case where the file to be sent is not created when you quit out of the editor without saving. * An exit handler now gets established that saves your NEWSRDR_PROFILE in case of abnormal exit from NEWSRDR. NEWSRDR V2.1-7, 25-FEB-1990 * DIR/SEEN and DIR/UNSEEN were not behaving properly. NEWSRDR V2.1-6, 24-FEB-1990 * All articles are now marked as seen in READ commands regardless of whether or not their retrieval is successful. This fixes a problem with previous versions of NEWSRDR where killed articles are counted as unseen. -- NOTE -- The unseen article problem (UPDATE says articles unseen, READ says there are none) should be fixed automatically the first time you use this version of NEWSRDR. If it does not, you can get rid of the erroneous messages from UPDATE by issuing a SET SEEN/ALL command for each of the affected newsgroups. NEWSRDR V2.1-5, 23-FEB-1990 * Added /SEEN and /UNSEEN qualifiers to DIRECTORY command. * Unseen article count now appears in DIRECTORY/GROUP lists. * UPDATE command now displays count of unseen articles (when count > 0). * READ display now includes number of unseen articles. * Seen article information is now cleaned up at profile writing time. NEWSRDR V2.0-4, 23-FEB-1990 * Default header cache size now 128 entries. * Fixed blank command line bug. * Minor documentation changes. NEWSRDR V2.0-3, 22-FEB-1990 * Modified EXTRACT to default file name to name of newsgroup. File spec on EXTRACT now optional. * Added SET ARCHIVE_DIRECTORY command to specify default location for extracted articles. * Fixed bug in POST. NEWSRDR V2.0-2, 21-FEB-1990 * Fixed header bug in EXTRACT command. NEWSRDR V2.0-1, 20-FEB-1990 * Bug in V2.0 profile-writing code (saving SET HEADERS settings) has been fixed. * The auto-continuation context, which allows you to press RETURN to continue reading an article or thread, is now cleared just before CLI$DISPATCH, rather than before CLI$DCL_PARSE. This provides behaviour closer to that of VMS MAIL. * The screen is no longer cleared prior to a subprocess spawn or exit from NEWSRDR. NEWSRDR V2.0, 19-FEB-1990 * "Kill files" implemented as SET IGNORE[/GLOBAL] command. * Rudimentary (VMS MAIL-like) support for keypad definitions added. * POST, REPLY now take /FOLLOWUP_TO qualifier to redirect followups. * READ/THREAD command added for easy message thread traversal. SET SEEN/THREAD added for easy thread removal. * CURRENT/ROTATE and EXTRACT/ROTATE commands were added for displaying and extracting articles posted in ROT13 cipher. * DIRECTORY command enhanced with /SUBJECT=, /KEYWORD=, /FROM= qualifiers for selective display. * Xref: headers now interpreted, so cross-posted articles are only displayed once. * The commands "R" and "RE" now are abbreviations for "REPLY" rather than "READ", to be more in line with VMS MAIL. * Just entering an article number at the command prompt does a READ on that article number, more like VMS MAIL. * "EX" is now a valid abbreviation for "EXIT", to be more in line with VMS MAIL. * Article headers are now cached locally on retrieval from the server, on a per-group basis, to improve the performance of some of the newer commands. The size of the cache can be controlled with a logical name. NEWSRDR V1.2-9, 14-FEB-1990 * NEWGROUPS processing at NEWSRDR startup has been fixed. This may cause a slew of NEWGROUP messages to appear the first time you use V1.2, if you had been using an older version. * SUBSCRIBE no longer requires an UPDATE/FULL first. It will query the server for info on groups not in NEWSRDR's in-memory group list. * The VMS MAIL interface code had an insidious bug that caused frequent but random crashing of NEWSRDR. This has been fixed. * The logic used for updating the "seen" group list had a minor bug that prevented SET SEEN from working properly in certain circumstances. This has been fixed. KNOWN BUGS AND RESTRICTIONS --------------------------- * UPDATE/FULL retrieves only the list of ACTIVE groups on the server. If a group is not in the active list (as returned by the NNTP LIST command), you will not see it with DIR/GROUP/ALL. You may still be able to subscribe to it, however. This behaviour will probably not change. TO DO ----- * There needs to be a SET NOSEEN counterpart to SET SEEN, or some way to mark an article or range of articles for future reference.