Newsgroup description hack to vnews

[riddle at ut-sally.UUCP]

Sigh.  In the age-old Usenet tradition, within minutes of posting to
net.sources I noticed a bug.  The three lines in grabngd.sh which read:

<< NGDESC= /usr/local/lib/news/ngdesc
<< NGDLOCAL= /usr/local/lib/news/ngdesc.local
<< INFORM= "usenet"

should be changed to read:

>> NGDESC=/usr/local/lib/news/ngdesc
>> NGDLOCAL=/usr/local/lib/news/ngdesc.local
>> INFORM="usenet"

In other words, I ran afoul of the Bourne shell's dislike of blanks in
assignments.

As you may have gathered, I goofed in the testing of the "grabngd" shell
script -- since the script depends on an event which only occurs every
two weeks, it's not the easiest thing to test.  I thought that I had
run the posted version of grabngd.sh through its paces as best I could,
but obviously I hadn't.  So please, watch for bugs in it and let me know
if you find any.  I'll post a corrected version if necessary as problems
arise.

In the meantime, the hack to vnews itself is quite usable without the
automatic description grabber.  It's been running here on ut-sally with
no complaints for weeks.

Shamefacedly yours,

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle