home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
The Datafile PD-CD 3
/
PDCD_3.iso
/
internet
/
readnews
/
!Incorp
/
!Help
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-04-07
|
10KB
|
209 lines
!Incorp © 1992 Julian Wright
----------------------------
This application forms a part of my application !ReadNews and MUST NOT BE
DISTRIBUTED SEPARATELY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER! So there! This
application is subject to the same rules and conditions that are described
in the help file for Readnews itself.
Right, now that's out of the way...
Purpose
-------
Incorp takes batches of news and email from Rucp and incorporates them into
the structure that Readnews uses.
MessageTrans Module
-------------------
Incorp uses the MessageTrans module, for internationalisation purposes. If
you are still running under RISC OS 2 and do not have this module, Incorp
can still function but some text messages, most notably the interactive
help ones, will not be available. MessageTrans is freely available but only
from officially sanctioned sources, so I cannot provide it with Incorp. You
may already have it though, as some Third-Party applications come with it.
Inside the !Incorp.!Run file, near the top, there are two lines which deal
with loading MessageTrans if it is needed. If you have RISC OS 2 and have
MessageTrans in your !System.Modules folder you should uncomment these
lines to ensure it gets loaded.
RISC OS 3.00 users and higher need not worry about any of this - for you the
module is already in your rom.
To use Incorp
-------------
Load !Incorp, and click on it's icon on the icon bar to start the
incorporation process. This multitasks fully, where possible, unlike earlier
versions. If the Verbose option is configured, then while Incorp is
incorporating articles it's status window will be open, looking much like a
RISC OS 3 filer_action window... :-)
There are two buttons on the status window while Incorp is incorporating,
"Abort" and "Pause". The Abort button will halt Incorp in it's tracks. The
Pause button will pause Incorp, and change into a "Continue" icon. Clicking
on Continue will make Incorp carry on from where you last paused it.
When Incorp has finished processing, it removes the Abort and Pause buttons
and replaces them with a single "OK" button, which simply closes the status
window when you click on it. It then opens the Summary window, if it was
not already open, or updates it if it was.
If Incorp tries to add an article to a 'full' newsgroup (ie one whose
directory is filled to capacity already) then it will do one of two things
depending on how it is configured. Either:
a) Delete the oldest article in the group and continue
or
b) Pause, with two extra options visible in the status window:
Delete - Delete oldest article and continue
Quiet - Delete all further articles as necessary
At this point you also have the option of reading some of the articles
with ReadNews, and deleting them there, after which point you can click
on Continue to get Incorp to try again without deleting any articles of
it's own.
Menus
-----
There are two - the iconbar menu and the Incorp menu, which can be accessed
from the incorp status window. The Iconbar menu has the following options:
Info: The usual info box.
Config: Leads to or opens the configuration window.
Quit: Hmm. I wonder what'll happen if I press this red butt...
The Incorp menu has the following options:
Faster: Speed up the process of incorporation at the expense of fast
multitasking.
Pause: Cause Incorp to pause when it reaches a full newsgroup.
Verbose: When unticked the status window will close; incorporation
will continue.
Config Window
-------------
This window can be accessed from the iconbar menu. It has three distinct
sections.
The icons in the top section determine whether incorp will scan for news, or
email or both. Only on of these options can be chosen at a time.
The icons in the middle section are all miscellaneous ones:
Faster:
If selected this causes Email to be scanned faster, at the expense of
multitasking speed.
Auto Delete:
If selected then when a full newsgroup is encountered Incorp will delete
the oldest article in that group immediately (as it did in earlier
versions of the software). If unselected then Incorp will pause when it
encounters a full newsgroup, and give you a chance to deal with the
situation yourself.
Verbose:
If selected then the status window will pop up automatically when you
start an incorporation. If not, incorporation will commence silently.
You can still pop up the status window at any stage during incorporation
by clicking on the iconbar icon though.
The bottom section deals with the timer. Incorp can be set to start itself
up every so often, and this section controls how often. (Or indeed if it
happens at all). Note that regardless of the state of the Verbose option,
a timer-initiated incorporation will not pop up the status window.
Summary Window
--------------
This window is opened whenever one or more of the following is detected:
- New news has just been incorporated
- New Email has just been incorporated
- There are new files in the UUCP Public directory
It contains up to three icons, depending on which combination of the above
has been detected. Each icon has a counter underneath it, which represents
the number of new postings, emails and files which have been received,
respectively.
Clicking on either the news or email icons will cause ReadNews to load,
while clicking on the file icon will open the public directory. Incorp
will continue to register new files until you move or remove the files
from the public directory.
Clicking with adjust will also close the summary window. Once the summary
window has been closed, it's counters are reset and it will not be
re-opened until there is more new stuff...
Version History
---------------
<1.00 - Command line version of program, didn't multitask.
1.00 - First multitasking version of Incorp (except for email) (1/5/92)
1.01 - Email incorporation now multitasks (5/5/92)
1.02 - Improved Faster mode - now it works even faster, and still keeps
the byte count updated properly.
Fixed problem with base creation causing an extra 'phantom' message
to be seen by the Newsreader. (10/5/92)
1.03 - Added option to not scan for either news or email (25/5/92)
1.04 - Fixed major bug... Incorp was locking up whenever an error occurred!
This didn't really bother me before, as errors are rare in my own
code 8^) But it was getting to be a bit of a pain, so the error
routine works now.
Incorp now handles news batches that aren't batches. That is, if
there is no '#! rnews' at the start Incorp assumes the whole file
is one article.
Re-worked the internals to make them neater. Implementing a pause
function when a newsgroup fills to capacity should be easy now.
Haven't tested the new code exhaustively though. (8/6/92)
1.05 - Added configure window.
Amended library and application to make use of more RISC OS 3
facilities where available.
Incorp now pauses (if configured) when attempting to write to a
full newsgroup, rather than just deleting the oldest article.
New options while so paused: Delete and Quiet.
Wrote routine to remove leading "."s from the start of lines in
incoming Email messages, but commented it out as it doesn't
work yet.
1.06 - Internationalised using MsgTrans.
Configuration options no longer have instant effect... they are
only noticed when Ok or Save buttons are clicked on.
Config window templates redesigned to place Save and Ok buttons on
a pane attached to the bottom right of the window.
Interactive help added.
1.07 - Now renames batches currently being worked on in order to prevent
a simultaneous UUIO task from eg, adding new articles to an Email
file which Incorp is currently processing in RAM. Incorp would have
then simply deleted the email file and the new email would have
been lost.
Thanks to a routine supplied by Philip Bank