From: "Trevor Hemsley"

I'm pleased to announce the release of Pronews/2 v1.54.

Pronews/2 is a multithreaded NNTP Newsreader program for OS/2. This release fixes bugs and adds some new features.

Before installing this release, you are strongly urged to make backup copies of your existing filter files (.pronewsheaders*.FLT and .pronewsglobal.FLT) as this release has changed the on-disk format of these files. If you need to revert to an older release of Pronews/2 then you will need to restore these backup copies prior to starting the older release for the first time. Failure to do this will leave you filterless if you have to revert to an older release!

You can find Pronews/2 1.54 on ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/incoming (later
to be ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/internet/news/reader) as pn2v154.zip.

Pronews/2 is shareware and all profits from its sale are donated to the charity Save the Children.

New features and important changes
==================================
1) Single Window mode is no longer an option. There was a serious design problem in this code and it had to be disabled.

2) There's a new 'Stop after current operation' option on the popup menu for a connection to a server. This allows you to have a connection finish its current download before it stops.

3) You can now search the body text of retrieved articles within a newsgroup.

4) ISO-8859-15 and Windows-1252 codepage support. In addition, posts made with Outlook[-Express] omit the correct header to set the default codepage to Windows-1252 and Pronews will set it for these posts automatically.

5) Pronews/2 will now checkpoint its task queue every time it has a task added or removed. In the event of a crash it's now possible to recover the queue as it was at the time of the crash. This requires action to implement and instructions are in the readme file.

6) Pronews now keeps 10 copies of its log file but you can control how large they are via an environment variable. Minimum size per log file, 100KB, max, 2GB-1. The oldest log files are aged off when 10 already exist. More info in the readme file.

7) Better Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird support. Pronews/2 will now search the PATH for Mozilla and add that path to the libpath for the current process. More info in the readme file.

8) You may now filter on the content of the XRefs: line and filter posts based on the selection of newsgroups to which they have been crossposted. For example, you can use this to find posts that are crossposted to *advocacy*. More info in the readme file.

9) New filter file format. A design problem in the filter files meant that no individual filter could be more than 255 characters. This wasn't enough when a subject line on its own could be that long. Each filter can now be 32KB in size.

10) High memory support. Pronews now uses high memory on releases of OS/2 that support this. With VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=1536 in config.sys I have successfully been able to open and process a single group containing more than 1.2 million articles.

11) Pronews now tokenizes filters on first use and will use the tokenised copy on subsequent uses of the same filter. Gives a ~30% increase in filtering speed.

12) New switches '-noid' and '-noua' have been added to pronews.exe parameters. These allow suppression of the message-id and User-Agent lines in posts made by you.

13) The maximum number of parts in a multipart decode has been changed from 2048 to an unlimited number.

14) Per server download statistics are now kept and displayed on the Pronews Control Panel. These counts can be reset to zero from the popup menu for each server. Useful for those of us on metered News server subscriptions.

There are several other enhancements listed in the readme file. Details of all 100 bugs fixed are listed in the fixed.txt file.

Some of these changes need user action in order to take effect. Details of the action required are in the readme file.

Enjoy.

-- Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK Trevor-Hemsley at dsl dot pipex dot com

Source: OS2VOICE

OS/2-eCS-ArcaOS General News

More in General  

OS/2-eCS-ArcaOS Software News

More in Software  

Latest Forum Posts

WarpStock and OS/2-eCS-ArcaOS Event News

Site News

More in Site News