Otherware

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Otherware / Otherware_1_SB_Development.iso / amiga / comms / network / grn1src.lha / GRn.doc < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1992-07-08 | 19.1 KB | 394 lines

GRn Gadtools Read News for the Amiga by Mike Schwartz Michael B. Smith ================================================================================ Mike Schwartz Michael B. Smith 1124 Fremont Ave. P.O. Box 6791 Los Altos, CA 94024 Charlottesville, VA 22906 mykes@amiga0.sf-bay.org mbs@adastra.cvl.va.us GRn is FreeWare. But, if you have a desire to donate, please feel free. :) We've gone to a great deal of trouble to try to make sure that GRn is as usable and bug-free as possible, but we can't guarantee it. Use GRn at your own risk. CREDITS Special thanks to Peter Cherna of Commodore-Amiga for his assistance with my GadTools questions. I still can't do EVERYTHING I want to with GadTools, but I am getting better, especially with his help. :):) Special thanks to Georg Sassen for his assistance with a DICE startup problem that haunted me for weeks. Special thanks are due to Matt Dillon, as well. He has helped me to make GRn as compatible with UUCP as possible. As well, his 'C' compiler, DICE, is head and shoulders above the rest of the Amiga 'C' compilers. If you don't have it, it is well worth the $50 to get the registered version. Special thanks to Christopher A. Wichura, who has been very helpful in getting GRn "clean" of Enforcer hits and Mungwall violations. IMPORTANT NOTES Throughout this document, "I" refers to the original author, Myke Schwartz. To install, read the file INSTALL which should have come with this archive. For run-time parameters, see the file GRn.man which should have come with this archive. GRn requires release 2.04 of AmigaDOS. GRn is designed to work with Dillon's AmigaUUCP versions 1.13, 1.15 and 1.16. It should work with NFS mounted C-News partitions as well. An NNTP module is in the works. GRn is written in 'C'. And typical of 'C' programs, it requires a bit of stack space. GRn should comfortably run with 16K of stack. It probably will work with 8K, but I won't guarantee it. Some of the subroutines have as much as 5K in auto variables/arrays... Due to way WorkBench works, you must either: a) Install GRn in the same directories where SendMail, PostNews and UUEncode reside, or b) Put absolute pathnames for SendMail and PostNews in your UULIB:Config file (you must still have UUEncode in the same directory). We may come up with a way to resolve this in the future. The "STOP" button in the fuel gauge requester in the Publish function does nothing. MANIFEST Each version of GRn should come with the following files: README CHANGES INSTALL TODO PROBLEMS GRn GRn.info uuencode GRn.doc GRn.man fonts/grn.font fonts/grn/8 Some archives of GRn will also include a version of MailMinder. Some archives of GRn will include source. UUENCODE A version of UUEncode is included as part of the GRn distribution. If anyone has problems with this version of uuencode, I am willing to replace mine with theirs. Regrettably, I have NO idea who wrote this uudecode program, or I would give him the credit he deserves. MAILMINDER Now distributed with GRn is another neato utility written to enhance UUCP under 2.04 (and up). This utility is called MailMinder. MailMinder adds appIcon(s) to your workbench display that (in default form) is a mailbox with flag up (if you have mail) or flag down (if you don't). MailMinder is fully configurable via tooltypes and can automatically launch DMail (or whatever) when you have mail or when you doubleclick the icon. Included with MailMinder are custom Icons drawn by Paul Broe, Dave Connors, Stephan Lussier, and Andy Wright. My thanks to these guys! Special thanks to Andy Wright, who passes along some very nifty scripts and such to go along with MailMinder. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW I've been on UseNet for over 7 years now (causing everyone pain and misery, I'm sure :). For the last year (plus), I've been using Matt Dillon's Amiga UUCP package to actually get to read/write news and mail on my Amiga instead of having to use some cryptic and barbaric Unix user interface over the phone at 2400 broads (oops, baud :). But after using DNews for all this time, I have always wanted to replace it with something that works better for the Amiga - something that uses Intuition and runs from an Icon, etc. Also, Matt has been too busy to polish up DNews to meet my demanding specifications :) Ever since 2.0 has come out, I've been using the new 2.0 functions. I typically don't write hard disk based programs for public consumption on the Amiga, so it never has made a difference to me to support 1.3. So if you don't have 2.0, you may as well stop reading and delete these files, or you may start drooling :) Or you should go and get 2.0. It is worth it. Once you go 2.0, you won't go back. I should also mention that I have tried to find other PD news readers, but none have even come close to what I envisioned an Amiga oriented News Reader to be. Too many of them are clones of Unix teletype style interfaces for my personal liking. GRn can be started from the CLI or from the workbench icon. I personally use the latter. BASIC CONCEPTS AND REQUIREMENTS GRn is patterned after some screen shots of XRn (X-Windows Read News) that a friend of mine sent to me. I've never used XRn, but it looks like a great user interface for News. I doubt that GRn is totally a look- and feel-alike for XRn, but it deserves a plug anyhow. Anything that makes Unix less cryptic is worth the plug! GRn assumes that you have the basic Amiga UUCP system assigns in place - UUCP:, UUTMP:, UUMAIL:, UUNEWS:, etc. GRn creates a file called username.grnrc in your UULIB: directory, where it keeps track of the News database. This file is NOT in ascii format, and can grow to be quite large - as much as 256 bytes per news article in your UUNEWS: directory tree. However, the binary format used provides for as fast a startup/shutdown as I could get, considering the inefficiencies of the Amiga filesystem for scanning directories. Due to problems with Dillon's software not using the system path to find its binaries, I've found that the only way to get GRn to work properly from a workbench icon is to put the GRn executable in the same directory as Dillon's binaries. More specifically, Dillon's PostNews Execute()'s BatchNews, RNews, and UUX, but when GRn is run from a workbench ICON, those Execute()s fail for some reason. Remember, if you keep your UUCP binaries in UUCP:c, as I do, put the GRn executable and Icon in UUCP:c also! GRn deliberately uses the full path to the executables as found in your environment variables or UULIB:config... So, for correct operation of GRn from the WorkBench, the binary directory must contain these programs: GRn, GRn.info, RNews, UUX, UUXqt, BatchNews, SendMail, PostNews and UUEncode (needed for Publish). To use GRn from the CLI, all of these programs must be on the CLI path. Finally, GRn is designed to work with its own custom 8-point font. This font is called grn.font and must be installed in your fonts: directory. There are valid reasons for choosing to do so... First of all, although GRn is pretty smart about algorithmically placing and sizing the various gadgets, it is easy for the user to choose a font that makes the gadgets not fit appropriately in the window. Second, the font I chose is narrow, so you can fit more columns of text in the browse listviews. OPERATION GRn operates in a single window, which can have two different looks to it. The two modes of operation are Group Mode and Article Mode. In Group Mode, you perform operations on newsgroups. In Article Mode, you perform operations on the articles in the selected newsgroup. There is a close gadget on the window. Use this gadget ONLY if you want to quit without updating your .grnrc file! The "Quit" button on the groups mode window is the normal method of quitting which saves updated news tree information to your .grnrc file. Both Group Mode and Article Mode have a Text gadget near the bottom of the window which is used to display messages. For Group Mode, the total number of newsgroups, articles, and unread articles is displayed. For Article Mode, the article number, remaining article count, and the name of the next newsgroup is displayed. In Group mode, you are presented with a list of all the newsgroups, along with the number of articles in each newsgroup and the number of unread articles in each newsgroup. Below this list of groups are a set of buttons which operate on the selected newsgroup. You can Catchup in a newsgroup, Read a newsgroup, Post to a newsgroup, or Publish a binary file to a newsgroup. You must select a newsgroup as the first step for any of these functions (that is, click on the newsgroup name). Click once on a newsgroup to select it and the various buttons become active as appropriate. For example, it doesn't make sense to be able to read a newsgroup which has no articles, so the "Read" button will be disabled. Double-clicking on the newsgroup is the same as clicking once and then clicking "Read". To Catchup, click on the Catchup button after selecting a newsgroup. All articles for that newsgroup will be marked as "read". To Read, click on the Read button after selecting a newsgroup. You will be taken to the Article Mode screen (explained below). To Post, click on the Post button after selecting a newsgroup. Your specified editor will be executed for you to enter the article. If you run GRn on a custom screen, you may need to enter LeftAmiga-M to bring the editor to the front screen. After you exit your editor, GRn requests you to confirm that you still wish to post the article. If you confirm, GRn does so. If not, the article is discarded. GRn also detects whether or not you actually changed the article. If you did not, GRn asks you whether to abort the posting or not. To Publish, click on the Publish button after selecting the newsgroup you wish to publish the file in. A file requester will be presented for you to choose the desired file to publish. GRn will automatically uuencode and make as many 500 line posts as needed to completely post the file. The subject line of each message will be formatted as "<filename> (part x/n)". There is a "bug report" button, which will automatically send me e-mail so you can easily access me to get bugs and/or enhancements done. There is also a UUCP Bug Report button which will post a message to the alt.sys.amiga.uucp newsgroup, to report bugs with UUCP. In Article Mode, the window takes a new display format. The list at the top becomes a list of the articles in the selected group, including the status (READ/UNREAD), the article number, the sender (parsed from the "From:" field of the article header), and the subject. This is a convenient way to browse through the articles available to read! There are two checkboxes below the list of articles named "Hide Headers" and "Hide Read Messages". When "Hide Headers" is checked, the browser window at the bottom of the window will not display article header information. When "Hide Read Messages" is checked, the articles list will only show UNREAD articles. "Hide Read Messages" is not yet implemented, so the box is permanently "ghosted". Below the checkboxes is a row of buttons. The "Groups" button returns you to the Group Mode display. The Prev button (bound to the 'p' and the 'b' keys) moves you to the prior article, if any. The Next button (bound to the 'n' key) moves you to the next article in the list, if any. The Unread button moves you to the next UNREAD article. The Next Group button (bound to the 'N' key) moves you to the next newsgroup with unread articles (if there are no newsgroups with unread articles, you are taken to the next group in the newsgroup list). The Prev Group button (bound to the 'P' and 'B' keys) moves you to the previous group in the newsgroup list. Finally, there is a cycle gadget that allows you to specify how to sort the list of articles. You can sort the articles list by Number, From, or Subject fields. This allows you a lot of flexibility as to how the Next/Prev functions work. If you sort by Number, you read in the order the messages were posted by Dillon's UUCP. If you sort by From, you can read all the articles by a certain person in order. If you sort by Subject, you can read the articles in "thread" fashion. Below these buttons are three text gadgets used to display the From:, Organization:, and Subject: fields from the selected article. When the "Hide Headers" option is selected, this is typically the header information that you'd care about, anyhow. But if you want to see other information in the headers, you always can with the click of the mouse... I like the Hide Headers feature, because you will more often than not be able to see entire articles in the browser window this way. Below the text gadgets is the article browser window. This window will contain the text (with or without headers) of the selected article. You have a choice of using the Mouse to scroll this window or to use the keyboard cursor keys. Unfortunately, one of the oversights in GadTools.library is that there is no way to tell how the user has used the mouse to scroll the ListView, so intermixing can be a bit confusing - but it does work as well as possible. Below the browser window is another row of buttons that operate on the currently selected article. You may save the article to a file, Reply to the article's poster via Mail, Forward the article to someone, FollowUp (post) to the article, or Print the article to your printer. This version of GRn uses the News and Mail Editors specified in your UULIB:config file. A future release of GRn will have its own composition window added to it so the package will be fully integrated. TECHNICAL INFORMATION GRn internally consists of three logical modules: main, gmode, and amode. The main program starts by parsing the environment variables NEWSEDITOR, MAILEDITOR, and USERNAME or finds them in UULIB:config. If the .grnrc file is found, main reads it into memory and then scans the newsgroups for deleted articles (pruning) and new articles. If the .grnrc file is not found, main scans UUNEWS: for groups and articles and builds a tree from scratch. main also checks to see if another copy is running and aborts if so (before reading the tree, of course). Two copies of GRn running at the same time can cause the News Trees to be out of sync and cause problems not worth addressing. For each group, the hide headers, hide read, and sort options are kept. This way, you can read one group sorted by subject and another sorted by from. When posting or replying, GRn puts a custom extension field into the article headers: "X-NewsSoftware: GRn, etc." RECOMMENDATIONS I recommend that you use your normal newsreader to catchup on all your news right away. Then you run GRn and use the catchup feature to get in sync. What's coming next: 1. I still want to work on the way sort by subject works. The Re: part should not be considered during the sort, except to put the original posting first. 2. The publish and hide unread gadgets are still disabled. Publish will allow you to automagically uuencode and post (in as many parts as needed) binary files to a news group. I will add a reverse option to the articles mode to automagically combine these kinds of postings and uudecode them (when you use SAVE). 3. There is still a huge wasted area below the groups LISTVIEW in groups mode. I intend to add new features there in the future. Please be patient. I intend to implement a full-blown uulib: configuration editor, preferences (like a way to change my bug report path if I move, GRn task priority, etc.), a button to start/stop CRON and UUCICO, and eventually GMail. 4. I intend to implement a nifty kill-file dialog/requester. 5. I will add the capability of GRn to iconify itself (into an appIcon). I have done this with other programs already, and it's no big deal... Things NOT implemented (I decided against doing): 1. Allowing the user to specify the font of his choice for the listviews. Until the Amiga has higher resolution and faster hardware display, it doesn't make sense to not have at least 80 columns of text for the article browser. 2. I was going to add some sort of statistic display while GRn was starting up. It is not needed anymore, since GRn zips now. 3. There were complaints about the size of the grnrc file. I was going to add a compressor/decompressor to shrink this. I have a real fast one I use in my games that does about what LHARC does (same percentage, but much faster). It isn't needed anymore, since I reduced the grnrc file size by 80%. Call for discussion: I have an idea that I would like feedback on. I want to implement a news/mail editor that is 100% consistent with the GRn interface. Currently, GRn supports no particular editor well. An integrated editor may seem controversial at first glance, but let me describe it in more detail and then you can send me flame mail (or whatever) with your opinions. The editor I envision has a different look for mail and news editing, so let me describe Mail first. The top of the window (same window as GRn uses now) would have String gadgets for you to enter To:, Subject:, Cc:, Bcc:, and Attachment: header fields. Next to each string gadget will be a button - if you hit the To: button, a requester with a listview containing your aliases and EVERY username GRn and GMail ever see in From: and Path: fields of all news articles and mail messages would pop up and you can simply select a name. If you click on the button next to attachment, a file requester pops up to request what file you wish to send as a binary with the mail (uuencoded, split, automagically). At the bottom of the window there will be several gadgets, among them: Save, Send, Abort, Include article/message, Include File, and print. The article editor has different gadgets at the top: newsgroups, subject, etc. Similar to the mail editor, you can click a button next to newsgroups: and you get a listview requester with a list of ALL newsgroups your UUCP knows about to choose from. At the bottom of this window, you have similar buttons to the mail editor. Now that you have a feel for the nature of the editor (unified environment), I'd like to point out that I don't believe the editor should be a massive, full-blown program editor by any means. In fact, I believe the editor should be pretty minimal. It will do word wrap and cut and paste (to the clipboard.device). It will be more than useable for what it is designed to do - edit mail and news articles (what a concept :) OK, I've had my say, let me know your opinions...