From: rawdon@colby.cs.wisc.edu (Michael Rawdon)
Newsgroups: news.software.nn
Subject: Re: The future of NN - good news (send me patches)
Date: 10 Sep 92 01:27:09 GMT
Reply-To: rawdon@colby.cs.wisc.edu
Organization: University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Dept., Madison, WI

Good news indeed!

In <BuB3sy.BE1@zeus.dialix.oz.au> peter@zeus.dialix.oz.au (Peter Wemm) writes:
>This is what I'm prepared to do:

>Last year,  Larry Bouzane <larry@garfield.cs.mun.ca> posted an unofficial
>patch 17 and patch 18.  They solve many of the more serious problems that
>were left in patch level 16.  As a lot of sites (That I know, at least)
>are using these, I am a little uncertain about what to do with them.
>I am tempted to repost them as "official".  I am also tempted to merge them
>into a more complete, unified, "fixit" patch - this would require removal
>back to pl16 source. I feel this might an un-necessary complication, and am
>leaning towards just making them official.  How do people feel about this?

My gut reaction is to merge them into one patch  But I have no strong
preference.  As long as people are reasonably satisfied that the patches are
of good quality, then I guess there's no great reason to make people go to
extra work to convert to the "official" patches.

>I would also like to try and organize a "development group" in the style
>of the elm development group.  If you would be interested in contributing
>to such an effort, please send me mail.
>I think a priority will be to get the falbled "groups menu" code working.
>A lot of people were excited about this back in May'91.

I'm not familiar with the elm development group (though I am familiar with
elm and use it extensively; just not its development group).  Perhaps you
could explain more precisely how it works?

>One other humble request:  My machine is fed via a commercial UUCP link
>which is charged for.  Please don't send excessive amounts of mail.
>If you have a general question/suggestion please consider the newsgroup
>news.software.nn.  That way, there is feedback from other users and I won't
>get 400,000 bug reports for the same bug.. (hopefully..)
>I constantly read the group...

Well, I'd like to reiterate an old suggestion of mine (which for all I know
one of the unofficial patches fixed):

What would make me most happy with nn at the moment is if it could be altered
so that newsgroups can be merged without automatically turning off
Consolidated Menus.  I would really like to be able to (for instance)
merge all the rec.arts.sf groups into one group, and all the rec.arts.startrek
groups (and, say, merge rec.music.misc and alt.rock-n-roll together), but
if condolidated menus are turned off when I do this (as they are in 6.4.16)
then it makes things an even bigger pain in the ass.

Moreover, I have noticed that sometimes nn does not merge groups which the
init file specifies should be merged.  That is, I can enter nn one time and
the groups will be merged as I specified, and then enter it a little later
without making any changes to my init file at all, and they are not merged.
This, of course, is rather annoying...

Fixing all this would be at the very top of my "wish list" for nn.

-- 
Michael Rawdon				 rawdon@colby.cs.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department, Madison, WI

beta test, v. To voluntarily entrust one's data, one's livelihood and one's
    sanity to hardware or software intended to destroy all three.  In earlier 
    days, virgins were often selected to beta test volcanos.
Newsgroups: news.software.nn