OS/2 Shareware BBS: 35 Internet/35-Internet.zip/wrpdis20.zip/NEWNEWS.NEW

Text File | 1996-04-21 | 16KB | 326 lines

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NEWNEWS Change History

1.64 Cleanup up lck files if NEWNEWS fails as suggested by Paul Ratcliffe
     <[e-mail]>

1.63 Introduced a bug somewhere around 1.60 which resulted in some articles
     being killed when they shouldn't have been.  Fixed this now.

1.62 Miss-spelt a variable (headerend) in one place, that resulted in the
     reporting of a bad artithmetic conversion.  Fixed.

1.61 GET file must override any kill action - had fixed this once before,
     but when kill_afterthefact was added, forgot to override in that case.

1.60 GetWholeArticles needed to expose some variables

1.59 added an option 'kill_afterthefact' which fetches whole articles from
     the newsserver, ignoring the kill file, and then discards any articles
     which are killed by the kill file.  Some people may find this gives
     better performance than normal kill file processing, even though killed
     articles are still fetched from the server, if they use kill files to
     avoid reading a particle person's posts, for example.

1.58 rnews_patch works for fetching news with a kill file now (cf 1.22)

1.57 improved messages during news collection, since I had missed a few
     places where double line messages were still displayed.

1.56 430 message abbreviated to just one line, and no longer displaying
     '???' for the newsgroup.

1.55 added an option 'kill_headers' which will prevent headers of killed
     articles being written to the batch file.

1.54 server now responding with 111 rather than 101 from date command.
     changed code so it accepts any response less than 300.

1.53 move determining of hostname outside restart, because otherwise on
     restarts the server name cannot be looked up and the program quits.
     This is a tribute to Demon that it hasn't been reported to me as a
     problem, since it would only happen when the newsserver was too
     busy !

1.52 don't read history file every retry, but just read once - same
     applies to kill file and perhaps another

1.51 implement use of server DATE command so that date and time on the
     server are fetched are recorded in your nntp.dat - this should
     ensure that all news is correctly fetched - although the proper
     solution is still to handle the TZ environment variable

1.50 temporary fix for suspected missing news by rewinding the time in
     your nntp.dat back one hour - but doesn't work if between midnight
     and 1am

1.49 use GMT on NEWNEWS and NEWGROUPS commands - previously it used the
     local time.  However, this is still not ideal, since unless the
     server and your machine are running at GMT news could still be lost

1.48 force unlock problem fixed, as a result of moving stuff into an
     ini file, the lock files were not known when the force unlock
     wanted to delete them.

1.47 get file not overriding the kill file, so if you had something in
     your get file which would be killed by your kill file you could
     never fetch it.  Now all articles in your get file are fetched first.

1.46 Martin McCarthy reported max_articles = -1 still not working, and
     provided a fix which has been integrated.  Hopefully it all works
     fine now.

1.45 add I param for ini file selection, defaults to NEWNEWS.INI, but
     can now be overriden with 'newnews Iother.ini'

1.44 fixed problem in non-kill file reporting of newsgroup to which
     article has been posted

1.43 add option to run unbatcher after collection, through the use of
     unbatch_news and unbatch_command in the ini file, news can be
     automatically unbatched upon successful collection.

1.42 display newsgroups to which article posted

1.41 move queue settings into ini file, which allows the name to be
     changed.  Also removed the Q parameter, which is now redundant, and
     replaced by the use of queue_messages and queue_name in the ini file

1.40 Second beta release of newnews w/ kill file support

1.39 And one more... fairly confident this time

1.38 And another.  Lucky these were never released ;)

1.37 Fixed another problem in the implementation of stacking

1.36 Fixed a problem in the implementation of stacking

1.35 Implementing stacking in kill file fetching

1.34 Fixed max_articles disabling feature.  If you set max_articles to
     a negative number, then it wouldn't collect anything.

1.33 The Rexx Queue used for sending messages to a control program (if
     one is being used) was hardcoded to WARPDIS.  Previously you had to pass
     the queue name in as a parameter (since the only way I could get queues
     to work, was to get os/2 to generate a queue name for me).  Since
     learning how to create queues of my own name, it seemed sensible to
     use WARPDIS, and thereby remove the need for the parameter.

1.32 beta release of newnews (NWNWS132.ZIP)

1.31 fixed one or two problems with kill files, all requests are still
     unstacked.

1.30 First attempt at unstacked kill file implementation

1.29 Added first part of kill file support, which just involves the reading
     of the kill file into corresponding variables

1.28 Added extra functions to handle the collecting of articles.  This
     doesn't change any existing functionality, just makes it easier to
     implement KILL files in the future.

1.27 a message is displayed when the 'NEWGROUP' command is sent to the news
     server.

1.26 setting max_articles to a negative number successfully passed the test
     added for 1.25, but would still cause problems :(  I have added another
     test for negative numbers, and treat this as an attempt to disable the
     max_articles feature.  i.e. if you don't want to set an upper limit on
     the number of articles to download, then set max_articles to -1

1.25 If max_articles setting was removed from newnews.ini or set invalid,
     then no articles would be retrieved.  A routine has been added which
     checks this (and in the future possible other) parameters read back
     from the ini file, and reports an error if it finds the setting invalid.

1.24 fixed writing to NEWGROUP_FILE.  It was simply overwriting what was
     already there, whilst now it appends to the end of the file.

1.23 added support for NEWGROUPS command.  By adding FETCH_NEWGROUPS = YES
     and a NEWGROUP_FILE to your NEWNEWS.INI file, new groups will be
     appended to the file as they are created at the newsserver.

1.22 moved call to readinifile, since RexxUtil DLL wasn't loaded early
     enough to execute one of the commands in the function

1.21 ka9q thinks that crlf is one character, rnews thinks that crlf is two
     characters.  This means that rnews.exe (which pays attention to the
     character count) truncated articles.  I've provided 2 fixes, which can
     be selected with the rnews_patch variable in newnews.ini.  I've
     defaulted it to 2 which should mean that ka9q style unbatchers and
     readers work fine and so does rnews.  The only noticeable difference
     might be on very long articles, when you may notice that in snews or
     cppnews there are a couple of blank lines at the end of the article.

1.20 parameters are now read from newnews.ini (which can be placed anywhere
     along your PATH) which means that each time you upgrade you no longer
     need to change the settings (unless a new parameter has been added).

1.12 Added a max_articles to download variable to limit the number of
     articles that are to be downloaded in any session.  First saw this
     suggested by Michael Collins <[e-mail]> in a post
     to demon.ip.developers <[e-mail]>

1.11 Added ControlQ to the expose line of all the procedures.  When the
     files were already locked and LockFiles was failing, it was unable
     to correctly report this via the Queue mechanism because ControlQ
     wasn't in scope.

1.10 Fixed ReadNNTP which was putting a blank line in as one of the groups,
     and consequently the group list when formatted for the NEWNEWS command
     was starting with a comma.  I suspect that this was upsetting the news
     server if you only had one newsgroup in the list.

1.09 Added a call to UnLockFiles in halt: routine which will hopefully
     remove the *.lck files when the user presses CTRL+BREAK for whatever
     reason.

1.08 Implemented code from Pete Appleton <[e-mail]> to read
     the ka9q_root variable from the os/2 environment variable KA9Q if it
     exists and default to c:\nos otherwise

1.05 Implemented a retry count.  If the reply from the nntp server is
     400 (indicating it is too busy at the moment) then the program
     will restart and try again.  Optionally a time delay can be set
     to ensure that it waits for a bit before retrying, the parameters
     to change are 'retries' and 'retry_delay' near the top of the
     program.  If these are set to 0 then the behaviour is the same as
     it was in versions prior to this (i.e. no retry).

1.04 Had some code from Friday <[e-mail]> to calculate
     julian dates, as a suggestion of handling wind back of 5 minutes.
     Was going to implement it, but decided in the end to just wind back
     5 minutes in all instances except when it was less than 5 minutes
     after midnight.  In that instance just wind back to midnight.

1.03 Andy Grieve <[e-mail]> reported that I wasn't closing
     sockets upon receiving a 400 reply from the nntp server.  Have now
     fixed this.  It was causing lots of open sockets to be left around
     when the demon news server was busy.

1.02 Implemented dot transparency to match that in getmail.cmd

1.01 Paul Barnett <[e-mail]> has implemented an improvement
     to the stacking of article requests.  The aim is to always keep 'stack'
     requests queued at the server, so it is always kepy fully occupied.

1.00 First Release

0.52 Removed time kludge in ReadNNTP, since it had problems around midnight
     and I don't think it was necessary really.  Might look at putting
     something similar back in later, but not for now.

0.51 Division by zero error in the ReportTimes function.

0.50 Final Beta Release.

0.29 added a condition to the update nntp.dat call, so that it will only
     happen if there have been at least one article downloaded.  This is
     in response to a report by [e-mail] that it has
     been updating the nntp.dat erroneously after reporting that there
     were 0 articles when in fact there were about 600 or so.

0.28 added a ControlQ parameter to allow the passing of a queue name, so
     that a control program can get some indication of how newnews is
     doing.  It will queue messages on this queue with the format:
      <NEWNEWS> START
      <NEWNEWS> FAIL NNTP 400
      <NEWNEWS> STOP

0.27 implemented stacked article requests.  To stack article requests (i.e.
     send multiple ARTICLE commands and then receive multiple articles)
     increase the stack variable at the top of the program.  Leaving it at
     1 results in unstacked article requests (i.e. same as before).
     Increasing it should improve performance, however, there may be problems
     if it is increased too high.  Experiments will need to be done to
     measure if it really does make any difference.  Increasing it to 6
     gave me 25% improvement on one test run, but increasing it further to
     12 reduced the improvement.

0.26 changed logging to report version number, and also implemented a measure
     of throughput.

0.25 bug in 0.24 prevented it running properly.  Fixed that and also added
     an 'F' parameter (f for force) to start collecting news even if the
     lock files exist.  It actually just deletes all the lock files before
     starting.

0.24 os/2 rexx considers that ' .' = '.'  This was having the disasterous
     effect of causing newnews to think that an article had finished when
     it had a line with leading blanks and a single period.  Instead of
     testing for just a period, I now also test the length of the line.

0.23 When newnews was run successfully in a morning, the time written into
     nntp.dat was invalid.  Specifically if the hours < 10 then it was not
     being prefixed with a zero.  This was probably the case for minutes
     and seconds also.  This would only have occured since version 0.17
     because it was the logic which set back the clock 5 minutes that was
     messed up.

0.22 newnews now reads the getfile before checking the history file and
     adds the message ids to those returned by the NEWNEWS command sent
     to the NNTP server.  Once all news has been gathered, the getfile
     is deleted, irrespective of whether the specific message ids within
     the getfile are retrieved successfully or not.

0.21 Put MySockSend() into newnews the same way that it is in GETMAIL, and
     checked a few additional return codes.  Also implemented logging.

0.20 Removed it again, because it makes transmission time of beta copies
     so long :(  Will add it back in if the code is to be released.

0.19 Added in GNU public license

0.18 LockFiles routine was not checking return code from open-writes, and
     the UnLockFiles was shelling out to execute an ERASE command rather
     than using SysFileDelete to unlock the files.  Both of these have now
     been corrected.

0.17 At the suggestion of Paul Hodges <[e-mail]> I now set
     the newtime that I will write to nntp.dat on successful collection of
     news, back by 5 minutes to help prevent any news falling through the
     gaps.

0.16 The reply upon connection was being ignored, even when it was a bad
     one.  The reply must now be 200 or 201, since we don't really care
     about whether we can post or not, otherwise we call unlock and close
     the connection.

0.15 RFC977 allows the NEWNEWS command to be followed by multiple
     newsgroups, separated by commas, as long as a total command length of
     512 (including CRLF) is never exceeded.  Modifications have been
     made to do this, although I haven't tested it with enough newsgroups
     to actually span 512 characters yet.  This change appears to have
     significantly improved the speed, as Peter said it would.

0.14 changed logging of '#! rnews 1234' line between articles in batch,
     after reading rfc1036.  ka9q/2 writes 10 zeros and goes back to
     patch in the size once it knows it.  Consequently, the size is
     always 10 digits long.  Originally I copied this behaviour, but
     after an exchange in demon.ip.developers it is clear that I can
     just write the size as I see it, without padding to 10 digits.

0.13 when a newsgroup had 0 articles since the lastdate lasttime, the
     total number of msgids accumulated so far was being reset.  This
     has been fixed to behave properly.

0.12 improved messages to give progress messages during article downloads
     Fixed the problem with the history file, by detecting an eof as the
     last character in the history, and overwriting if it exists.  Bit of
     a kludge and I would have expected REXX to understand x1a, but
     apparently not.
     Also fixed a problem of spurious #! rnews 000000000 records being
     inserted in batch.txt when an article did not exist (reply 430).
     An #! rnews 000nnnnnn should now only be written if there is at
     least one line of an article to download, otherwise it is assumed
     that the article is unavailable for whatever reason.  The reply
     from the newserver is displayed on the screen.

0.11 Fixed the problem with nntp.dat, where the new data and time were
     not being written in the correct place, and were leaving the nntp.dat
     file corrupted.