mothra

mothra

[miller]

plan9.cs.york.ac.uk!forsyth writes:

>  the approach followed by beto and others
> of making the news reader a client of acme (cf. Mail) is better in many
> ways.

I find that con -l -r -C net!$newshost!nntp has a certain minimalist 
attraction, but an acme newsreader would be more convenient ... is there
one available somewhere?

-- Richard Miller

mothra

[forsyth]

>>Does "Rin-Tin-Tin" enter into it?  

ha. got you.

mothra

[Berry]

>>>forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk said:
 > i've got a separate netnews program called `rin' built using the panel 
library.
 > the name is full of significance for me.

Does "Rin-Tin-Tin" enter into it?  

If I implement a newsreader, I want to call it "Milou".

  --berry

Berry Kercheval :: kerch@parc.xerox.com :: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

mothra

[forsyth]

>> performs.  The only things it beats mothra on are
>> features that I never got to, mainly tables, hard-copy
>> output & netnews.  Its page formatting sucks dry air,
>> its navigation buttons never do what you want, it
>> makes it as difficult as possible to type urls, its
>> menu layout is, at best, bizarre.  I look forward to
>> not having to use it any more.

i can't stand netscape myself; i use it only when some site
officiously throws me into a distinct `download Explorer' or `download Netscape'
page for every page i select.  (they nearly always want to make
their pages ugly and confusing by using `frames'.)

it's interesting that in recent releases of Netscape, asking for
netnews puts you in what is almost a completely different program,
with a substantially different interface.  being Netscape, that different program
is buried inside the web browser (along with a Java interpreter,
and the rest of an amazingly ugly CGI operating system, following in the tradition of
Emacs and Perl).

td was right not to implement tables months ago; the specification
has changed significantly (it's now more straightforward).
similarly for all the other crud that died with HTML+ and HTML3.0.
i'm considering implementing tables in mothra now, since
someone here complained about it.

i've got a separate netnews program called `rin' built using the panel library.
the name is full of significance for me.
since netnews is mainly text, however (or rather, something that passes for
text, if not for thought), the approach followed by beto and others
of making the news reader a client of acme (cf. Mail) is better in many
ways.  then again, cat >/dev/null is often just as good a news reader as any.

mothra

[td]

>I notice that mothra doesn't react well to certain web pages,
>http://all.net/ for example.  It looks like the event library sees
>something unexpected and flags an error, which causes one thread to
>abort().  The others hang around in a confused state.

Mothra was in an extremely preliminary state when the CD-ROM was cut.
I will try to get the current mothra, which fixes this and many other
problems, put on our ftp machine.

mothra

[Scott]

I notice that mothra doesn't react well to certain web pages,
http://all.net/ for example.  It looks like the event library sees
something unexpected and flags an error, which causes one thread to
abort().  The others hang around in a confused state.

Aside from debugging the immediate problem, is there a good convention
for making sure all the processes in an application go away when one
does?  Killing the process group sounds like the right idea at first
glance.

mothra

[forsyth]

mothra's save function seems to go into a loop,
generating write(..., ..., 0) .
certainly it seems to be responsible for the Twrite(count=0)
requests i'm seeing on the ethernet, and the code

save+#113?      CALL	read(SB)
save+#118?      MOVL	AX,CX
save+#11a?      CMPL	AX,$#0
save+#11d?      JLT	save+#13c(SB)
save+#11f?      MOVL	ofd+#1014(SP),AX
save+#126?      MOVL	AX,#0(SP)
save+#129?      LEA	buf+#c(SP),AX
save+#12d?      MOVL	AX,#4(SP)
save+#131?      MOVL	CX,#8(SP)
save+#135?      CALL	write(SB)

looks like
	while((n=read(fd1, buf, sizeof(buf)))>=0)
		write(fd2, ..., n);
to me.

perhaps this is an appropriate time to beg for a boddle of the mothra
changes, so i can reconstruct the source, and libpanel updates, if any?