Progress on rn 4.4

[rrn at lib.tmc.edu]

Some of you have wondered what will be in rn 4.4. Here is a short and
still incomplete list. As stated at the NNTP BOF back in January, all
the non-threaded features of TRN are in rn 4.4. It will also have been
checked out on a large number of computers by the time it is released.

		    NEW FEATURES OF RN 4.4 vs RN 4.3

New or modified commands
	e		extract a shar or uuencoded file. (article level)
	g number	g command will go to a newsgroup by number where the
			the number corrsponds to that used in the list 
			supplied by the 'L' command. (newsgroup level)

New display ordering:	the articles appear in their reply order.

New magic (use +H to turn them off)
	-Hfrom		displays only the commented portion of the user name.
	-Hdate		displays the date in local time.

New environment variables
	EXSAVER		shell command that starts an extraction.
	UNSHAR		the unshar program to use (default /bin/sh).
	REPLYTO		the value to use for the "Reply-To:" header, if
			needed.
	NEWSORG		Same as ORGANIZATION. Used for those sites that
			need ORGANIZATION for other purposes (Apollos).
New % interpolations
	%#		keeps an incremental count during a multi-file save,
			extract, etc.  ":s part.%#"
	%e		the last command executed to extract an article.

Macros and Keymaps

Configure improvements
	Now uses nm to read contents of libc. ar is used if nm fails.
	Configure also provides the option of editing config.sh before
	config.h and all the shell scripts are created.
	Configure stores the origanization name in double quotes in
	config.sh. This avoids a problem with organization names that
	have single quotes in them (i.e. many French and Canadian 
	organizations).

General improvements
	Makes use of POSIX capabilities if present.
	ANSI C Compatible
	Hostname may be read in from a file instead of using system calls.
	
Miscellaneous
	When GETPWENT it defined and an invalid userid is used, an 
	error message is returned. Previously, rn would core dump.

	The newsgroups script now knows how to deal with "bogus" newsgroups.
	[These are groups in the active files marked with status 'x'.]
	
	If there is no news on rn startup and the user enters a "g" at
	the newsgroup level, the program will now correctly note that
	no newsgroup name has been entered and reprompt.