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Text File | 1994-06-11 | 25.4 KB | 477 lines | [TEXT/R*ch]

+------------------------------+ |Release Notes For ToadNews 1.1| +------------------------------+ Brought to you by: John P. Mah Toilets 'R Us Software 201 Riviera Dr, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada P7B 6H8 (807) 767-7549 Please e-mail jpmah@math.undergrad.uwaterloo.ca for bug reports, suggestions or comments. +------------------------+ |Notes About This Release| +------------------------+ Thanks for showing interest. This release should definately improve performance and reliability over the previous public version 1.0. In addition, I have added some functionality that users have requested. Some of the additions include the ability to directly read SOUP *.MSG newsbatches. (for example, the newsbatches by "uqwk" by Steve Belcyk) ToadNews now supports user-selectable newsbatch preprocessors (ie: file decompressors), and article postprocessors. This allows users to use other applications to decompress newsbatches compressed with formats other than the built-in "uncompress" format. For example a user can specify a AppleEvent-aware application that knows how to decompress files compressed with "gzip". Article postprocessors (threaders) can now be specified to run after any unbatching or expiring. This allows newsreaders to generate article header files so that they may run faster or provide increased functionality. Use of an external decompressor also increases performance by telling the decompressor to decompress files while ToadNews processes other ones. Check out the new scheduler! Yup, that's right. ToadNews can now be configured to process news, expire, run an external threader and quit at specified times. You can also specify ToadNews to perform tasks at startup, and then quit as soon as it's done. Error recovery has also been added to this version -- if a problem comes up during processing causing ToadNews to stop (such a disk full error), ToadNews will save the necessary information to restart processing later (once the problem has been solved), ignoring any information that has already been processed. A "junk" newsgroup has now been added to hold articles that were improperly formatted or were posted to newsgroups that you didn't subscribe to. (an option to turn "junk"-ing off now exists as well) ToadNews is also now semi-scriptable in the sense that the 4 basic AppleEvents are supported, and that it can be scripted to perform basic functions. Sorry, no recording support (or anything terribly fancy). There are now default locations (configurable via ResEdit) for the batch and spool folders, as well for the active file and external applications. I encourage any Internet providers who wish to provide "out-of-the-box" installations for their users to contact me to get the information on how to modify these resources. By properly setting these up, users won't need to perform complicated installation procedures. I should also point out that you should definately backup up your current "ToadNews Preferences" file and then remove it from your Preferences folder, since the way ToadNews handles preferences in this version is slightly different than previous versions. Users updating from version 1.0 should trash their current "ToadNews Preferences" file (from their System Folder), and run the new version, since their were some radical changes in the way that preferences were saved. Sorry about that but it just had to be done -- trust me. Thanks to all of you who have paid their registration fees! I really appreciate this. Hopefully some of the functionality in this new release accurately reflects your suggestions and requests. Thanks, - John, June 9/94 +---------------+ |Version History| +---------------+---------------------+ |v1.1 - Second Public Release for v1.1| +-------------------------------------+ • Will now recognize SOUP format *.MSG files as valid input files (when using the automatic unbatcher) • Now has an option for putting invalid articles in the newsgroup "junk". You can turn this option on by checking the appropriate box in the "Unbatcher Preferences" dialog box. • Now gracefully stops processing batch files when news disk space is exhausted. It's also smart enough to not run any threading applications after such a condition. Isn't technology wonderful? • Will now save how much of the current input batch file was processed when the spool disk runs out of disk space. • Stopping any unbatch process will now save how much of the batch file was saved, so that any future unbatching will not use the parts of the file that have already been processed. • Fixed bug that caused articles with redundant subjects -- ie: Subject: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac to have unresolvable aliases. TN will now only save one copy of the article per newsgroup in these cases. • Fixed saving the spool and batch folder locations after using the default settings. • Fixed a problem with writing the log file to disk (it would incorrectly report failed assertion's in CToadNewsLog::AddLogLine(). • Error messages are now stored in resources. Will attempt localization later. (only English messages right now) • Changed the way newsgroup folder ID's are verified. Now detects incorrect ID's before writing anything to disk. The check is also performed when ToadNews first starts up. This should help eliminate problems with files being lost or misplaced due to invalid directory ID's. +-------------------------------------+ |v1.1b2 - Second Beta Release for v1.1| +-------------------------------------+ • Fixed external threading bug that would corrupt other apps. • FIxed bug that would cause entry of a repeat time of 00:00 minutes in the entry of a scheduled task to result in an infinite loop. • Fixed Re-"Using" a ToadNews active list doesn't refresh the Newsgroup window bug • Added back the internal "uncompress" decompressor (whew!), which is used if no external decompressor is selected. • Changed string array classes so that adding new newsgroups during an unbatch wouldn't re-sort the entire newsgroup list. • Fixed bugs in "Unbatcher Prefs" dialog, which would corrupt stack. • Modified the way text was wrapped in the folder name fields in the "Unbatcher Prefs" dialog. • Miscellaneous tunings to code, mostly removal of redundant code. • Removed support & usage of "Message Header" files (again). • Running an expire (newsgroup or global) now disables the appropriate buttons in the Newsgroup window. • Added cascading of unbatch/decompression -- while unbatching one file, ToadNews now sends the next file in the queue to the external decompressor if it needs to be decompressed. • Fixed yet another bug with the unbatcher prefs (calling an invalid instance method) • On disk writes (especially article writes), the disk cache is now bypassed. • Added "Startup" preferences, so that we can do things like unbatch, expire, thread, and quit immediately after starting up. Holding down the option key, forces TN to NOT perform the startup tasks. • Moved some more prompts to the STR# resource format. • Added back the "decompression stats" messages when using the built-in decompression routines. • Added modifications so that expires used "clumping" of file deletion together -- speeds up expires and removing newsgroups from active list • Fixed memory leak while expiring news • You can now set the largest article number in a group (applies to all newsgroups), by changing the 'MAr#' resource in the application's resource fork. There will be no user-interface setting for this, as this really shouldn't be altered except for special cases. (you know who you are) • Default largest article number in a newsgroup is now 65535 (up from 32767). This was changed since we no longer have to deal with resource IDs and generating message header information for articles. • Changed the newsgroup window to truncate newsgroup names after 35 characters (if a name is truncated, a '…' character replaces the 35th character) • Expanded the "First", "Last", and "Total" fields in the newsgroup window to allow for numbers that are at most 8 digits long. • Fixed bug in lookup code that would cause stack trashing under low memory conditions. +---------------+----------------------+ |v1.1b1 - Initial Beta Release for v1.1| +--------------------------------------+ • Added support for external decompressors (so that gzip or other compression standards can be used) and threaders (provideable by the newsreaders?) can be used. • Added scheduling (and corresponding UI) for scheduled: a) Unbatching b) Expiring c) Running of an external threader d) Quitting after all other scheduled tasks have completed • Progress window is now a floating window, complete with progress bars for both expiring and unbatching. Since the ToadNews no longer does decompression, it no longer switches the colours of the progress bars, like v1.0. However, it now sports the same ugly coloured bars as the finder and other popular apps. • Unbatcher now adds "Xref:" article header lines to cross-posted articles (useful for newsreaders) and strips away any old "Xref:" passed on by newsfeed. • Modified unbatching algorithm to speed up making the "Path:" header line. • Option added to turn on/off processing updates of the Newsgroup window while expiring or unbatching occurs. Turning off updates speeds things up. • ToadNews now remembers all window positions and whether or not they were visible upon last application use. • Added easy-startup folders... configurable by ResEdit as 'STR ' resources, these resources specify a default folder location for certain components upon initial startup. If the default folder locations aren't present, then the program presents the normal "Welcome To ToadNews" alert, as before • Added easy-startup external configuration... like above folders. If externals aren't present in default location, then their use is prohibited until manually configured. • Newsgroup & Scheduler windows now support multiple-selection operations (Edit/Remove/Delete etc.) Shift-clicking toggles selection of items from the list. • "Removing" a newsgroup from the list of active newsgroups now deletes *ALL* the files in that directory. Make sure you don't put other important stuff in ANY newsgroups folder if you plan on removing it later. • Unbatching batch folder and expiring all newsgroups can now be done by clicking the respective "Start" button in the Progress window. • Spool and batch folders can now be alias to other folders • Changed initial setting for "Save backup active file" to OFF +-------------------------------+ |v1.0f0 - Initial Public Release| +-------------------------------+ • Fixed-up the code that handles low-memory conditions, the log window should now properly erase the log without stomping all over the heap. Some things had to be sacrificed, noticeably, ToadNews will no longer report memory log messages after erasing the log window. Note: low-mem condition handling still isn't perfect, and will still crash under certain conditions… (Moral of the story: don't try and lower ToadNews' memory partition to below the suggested minimum) • Fixed bug that would corrupt the application heap when a bad "#! rnews" article size is found in a newsbatch. • Added the "Generate Message Headers" option to the Unbatcher dialog. Users whose favourite newsreader doesn't use the Message Headers file in each newsgroups folder, can uncheck this option, and save themselves some disk space and increase the general speed of unbatching and expiring. (at the expense of adding more work to newsreader itself) • The unbatcher now only flushes its message header buffer only when necessary, not after processing each newsbatch file. Seems to speed up unbatching when the number of messages in a newsgroup gets really high (eg: ~500+ messages <= NOT RECOMMENDED! :-) ) +----------------------------------------+ |v1.0b8 - (Sleep Depravation 101 Release)| +----------------------------------------+ • Added log file support. ToadNews now will write all messages to a file "ToadNews Log" in the spool folder. If you don't have a spool folder selected at the time, then you can't enable the option. • Fixed the new newsgroup creation bug. (ie: you had to add the group twice, and TN would complain bitterly) • Some perf work done to the expirer & unbatcher components, memory cleaning is no longer done after each file has been processed. • Log window now presents the information in a "cleaner" format. (I think) Plus, it doesn't repeat redundant information, thus saving some disk space when the "Save messages to log file" option is turned on. • The decompression routines now utilize the TICKs resource parameters. • Fixed the Balloon help messages for the preferences dialogs. • Changed some warning & error messages. +-----------------------------------+ |v1.0b7 - (Espresso of Evil Release)| +-----------------------------------+ • Finally tracked down the bug that caused users who received 16-bit compressed newsbatches >64K to crash. It turns out there was a bug in the decompression code which caused early termination of the decompression of these newsbatches, wreaking havoc. • The interval between checks for new files in the default batch folder is now specified in minutes, rather than seconds. • Added a "Unbatch Batch Folder" command to allow users to unbatch the contents of the default batch folder immediately, rather than waiting for the watch interval to roll around. • Some minor tweaking of log code, including proper adjustment of the horizontal scrollbar in the log window. • The log now also displays the amount of free space on the spool volume (drive where the spool folder resides). • Added some more warning messages about improperly formatted articles in newsbatches. ToadNews will try and be more specific of the problem. +--------------------------------+ |v1.0b6 - (Mean Omelette Release)| +--------------------------------+ • Properly fixed "Select Folder" routine to properly initialize the button name correctly when first opening the dialog. (It bus errored on 68000 machines) I also properly tested the fix this time around too… :=) • Manually unbatching newsbatches no longer turns on the auto-unbatching feature. • Fixed a bug which would caused ToadNews to forget which files had already been examined in the default batch folder. • Beefed-up the decompression routines to make them a little more robust in error handling. Decompression seems to be ALOT more stable than the b5 (Spicy Burrito) release. • Decompression no longer causes the application stack to collide with the application heap. (At least that's what my testing shows :=) ) • Drag-and-dropping applications onto the ToadNews program icon, no longer tries to open the files up and unbatch articles. (whoops!) • Took out the MF-friendly saving/loading of the active file… it seemed to crash ToadNews undeterminately. • Fixed a MF-friendly routine so that routines are called once per idle _WaitNextEvent. (before, some operations received twice the amount of attention and would make other programs MF-unhappy) • The expirer progress window now shows up in its proper spot. (much nicer than overlapping with the other progress window) • Added some UnloadSeg's to the program, so that unused segments are now only loaded into memory when needed, saving some memory. • Added the ability to unbatch compressed newsbatches that did not contain the "#! cunbatch" tag. (This format is used by C-News by default) • Added a "undocumented & UI-less" set of parameters that allow the user to configure ToadNews to be more/less multitasking friendly. Check the descriptions of the resources of type "TICK". Each resource has a single unsigned long as a type, which allows the user to decide how much of the processor time should be given to other apps. (ie: the lower this number, the faster and more of a CPU-hog ToadNews will be) There are four resources, and each describes a different situation. For example, TICK ID 0, is the how every often (in ticks) the system will call the routine which unbatches articles when ToadNews is the foreground application. (TICK ID 1 is similar, but gives the time for when ToadNews is in the background) If the number is 25, for example, the unbatcher gets called every 25 ticks. • ToadNews will now confirm any attempt to quit the program while there is a unbatch or expire in progress. • Chucked the current log window storage code… ToadNews now uses Christopher Wysocki excellent CPEditText class to store the log window text. This shows better performance than the old code when used on slower machines. +--------------------------------+ |v1.0b5 - (Spicy Burrito Release)| +--------------------------------+ • Mostly bug fixes and things I overlooked. • Fixed "Select Folder" routine to properly initialize the button name correctly when first opening the dialog. (It bus errored on 68000 machines) • Fixed the mysterious "Article destined for newsgroup A going into newsgroup B" bug. (Caching of the wrong index when looking up newsgroup information was causing this, but only when newsgroup names were hashed to similar values) • Fixed a bug that would cause a crash if the last window was closed, and another "Close" was selected from the menu. Incidentally, this also fixed another memory leak. • Fixed a bug which caused any editing in the Newsgroup window to call up a "Save/Don'tSave/Cancel" dialog, even though it isn't useful. • Fixed bug which caused a new install to improperly place log window in a moveable position. (ie: window at (0,0)) • "Remove" button in Newsgroup window is now made inactive when unbatching or expiring is performed. • Last article number information is now properly saved when altering the newsgroup attributes in the Newsgroup window. • Backup of active file is done just before saving new one. Before it would back it up immediately after reading... don't ask me why I did that way in the first place, because I don't know why. Sigh. • Speeded up the saving of the active file. Also, reading and saving the active file is now done MF-friendly, so to speak (you can switch out of TN while saving and reading). +---------------------------------+ |v1.0b4 - (Chicken Wiener Release)| +---------------------------------+ • New and improvemed active newsgroup editor! Try it out. It looks slicker and feels ten times faster. Also, during unbatches and expires the window will update itself every few seconds. • New dialog for adding/editing active newsgroup information. I now let you change the first/last article # information as well. • Fixed that annoying window hiliting problem. Some ToadNews windows were being selected and hilited when TN was in the background and a window was closed in that layer (ie. the Progress window was closed) • Changed some prompts and error messages so that some consistency was kept. • Message headers are now saved in a file named 'Message Headers' (go figure!) in each newsgroups' spool folder. This is so newsreaders can quickly access this information. In the next release, I will start storing 'Message-ID' fields as well, so that articles coming from different feeds will not be duplicated. • Cool new icons. My artistic talents are getting too avant-garde for a Music major. Scary. • Added some colour buttons and some new colour perks. • Version Info is no longer. But the info is still there :=) +--------------------------------+ |v1.0b3 - (Space Cabbage Release)| +--------------------------------+ • Support for compressed newsbatches is now operational. Try it out. I think the uncompression throughput is pretty good, depending on how much memory is available... you might want to leave some extra memory sitting around in the system if you use compression. (I think the decompression routine allocates something like 200K when decompressing 16-bit compressed newsbatches) • Some minor user interface changes. The Newsgroup window is now modal. I did this since, I find that most of the time, I never kept the window open during unbatching or expiring. (this reduced code size by a few K) Also, in some of the dialogs, I replaced the fancy text fonts with a PICT instead, so that things looked ok on systems that were lacking those fonts. • Progress bars also are now colour coded: green = decompressing a file blue = unbatching a file red = expiring articles. • The Auto-Expire and Auto-Unbatch features now remember their on/off settings from session to session. • The log window now records thorughput for both uncompression and unbatching. Most of the messages now note the current filename as well. • Fixed a conflict with AutoDoubler (AutoDoubler didn't like me using async PBOpen() on a compressed file for some reason). Changing the call from PBOpen() to FSOpen() seemed to fix the problem. +---------------------------------+ |v1.0b2 - (Powdered Toast Release)| +---------------------------------+ • ...grrr... more bug fixes. I finally realized that the final release of UUPC 3.0, uses binary file formats (ie. LF-delimitted text) and not Mac-style text files (CR-delimitted), like some of the beta releases. ToadNews will handle BOTH styles, however, it does so by looking at the file types. Types '????' are interpreted as Unix-style (LF's only) text files, and types 'TEXT' (used by older beta releases and UUPC 2.0) are interpreted as Mac-style text files. Note: if you don't have the file types set properly, then ToadNews will crash. I'm trying to make things more robust in this area, but it will take time. As a consolation, things should work right out the box for now, provided that you are using UUPC3.0 final. At least now it works properly. (This whole issue of '????' vs. 'TEXT' was probably the biggest reason why you folks were crashing all the time!) • The unbatcher now only automatically unbatches newsbatches that start with 'rnews'. This prevents the unbatcher from trying to unbatch the intermediate UUCP D.xxxxxxx files that are used in UUCP processing. • You can now drag-and-drop newsbatches onto the application icon for processing (for those who don't want ToadNews running in the background). • I cleaned up the interface a little bit, hopefully making things a little more easier to understand. I'm still unsatisfied with the interface for the Newsgroups window. It sucks. Added some colour (yes, I'm Canadian, eh?) to the progress window. • I also added some more options: you can now specify whenever you want automatic expirations to occur (ie. either when the free space percentage falls below xx% or whenever a certain time interval (ie. a day) has passed. You can now also turn off the automatic modes of the unbatcher and the expirer. Oh yeah, you can also toggle the visibility of the progress window during processing. • I also think that background processing is a more friendly. It's not for sure, but the program right now is expiring in the background and I don't notice any visible CPU impact. I think the same is for unbatching, but sometimes, its hard to really tell. • There are pop-up menus in the Unbatcher and Expirer prefs now (which are new now in this release). These will used in specifying CPU priority. They AREN'T honoured yet. Oh well. • Compressed batches are still in the works, the biggest problem being the amount of memory needed to do compression (I think I need something like 450K or just to build the decompression tables for 16-bit UNIX compress!). Another possibility I'm thinking of is using tickle, and send it Apple Events. Could get pretty funky... • Note that you can add groups quickly by just putting the names of the newsgroups (one to a line) in the ToadNews active file and ToadNews will fill in the defaults for the group as well as creating a folder for each of the newsgroups under the spool folder. This has always been a feature, I just forgot to mention it. • Also added some 'limited' Balloon Help. I know one case where there is an error in the text (Grayed AutoExpire menu). No help yet for dialog boxes. +--------------------------------+ |v1.0b1 - (Natural Lemon Release)| +--------------------------------+ • Fixed some pretty nasty bugs that deal with aliases. Also, when you switch spool folders, ToadNews will now ask you if you want to use any existing active files present in that folder. Other additions include fixes for default button handling in dialogs, extended keyboard support in the Log window, fixes for unbatching to a different volume other than the one the application is on, and some asynchronous I/O routines to make background operation more tolerable. (not enough though!). ToadNews also now checks for the existence of a queued file before it starts unbatching it, since UUPC uses temporary files that come and go as it wishes. Some other UI settings were also fixed (ie. windows being properly created unselected if the app was in the background). New Finder icons based on the Ramin Kamal's totally excellent icons for the newsreader (its not ready yet... :=) ). Oh yeah, expiring is about 4X faster! (I love asynchronous I/O!)... and has minimal impact on system slowdown! • There still is a bug with the Log window placement, but it is still recoverable by unchecking the 'Restore windows' option and quitting and then restarting. +------------------------------------------+ |v1.0b0 - (Natural Apple Cranberry Release)| +------------------------------------------+ • First beta release. Finally! Still has some problems when a large number of files into the incoming batch folder (ie. 76 files) Compiled with THINK C 5.0.2 and TCL 1.1.2 with full optimizations. Not tested fully with the optimizations, but hopefully the compiler has done "safe" optimizations... yeah right. Still not sure about safe memory partitions.