About this Release (6.5):
-------------------------

Kim Storm is no longer actively maintaing NN..  This release was put
together by Peter Wemm <peter@DIALix.oz.au> with the approval of Kim
at the time.  Originally it was intended that I would just collect
patches, but it turned out differently.  We have called this version
6.5 so as to distinguish it from Kim's work.  We've made some pretty
radical internal changes, some that have not been completed, and don't
want the blame associated with Kim... :-)

I personally think more work needs to be done to clean up our mess,
but time has dragged on for too long.  I've been convinced to make an
interim release just to get the bug fixes out there.

-Peter

New features in release 6.5 (compared to release 6.4.16):
---------------------------------------------------------

Incompatable changes from a user point-of-view:
-----------------------------------------------

none known..

Major improvements:
-------------------
	- The lines count on the menu can be always counted.
	- Various timezone handling fixes.
	- nngrab speedups
	- nn startup time speedups
	- :decode is smarter
	- Log messages are more intelligent in some cases
	- Compatability improvements with INN. (aka synchronous posting)
	- various tweaks for compatabilty with wierd NNTP systems.
	- support for terminals without clear-to-end_of_line capability
	- better 8-bit character set support (during posting)
	- much improved support for ANSI compliant compilers.
	- Keld Simonsen's "A way to read even less news!" (see ignore-re and
		auto-select-rw)
	- nnmaster wont die on transient NNTP server errors (400 load too high)
	- subject-match-parts is slightly more intelligent
	- mailer-pipe-input now works
	- NOV is supported (as per Geoff Collyer's patches)
	- NOV over NNTP with the XOVER extension is supported.
	- article body search implemented, although not for NNTP case.
	- NN with NOV over XOVER does not use temporary files any more. It
		reads directly from the file to the NNTP server.
	- Mouse support when using Xterm.
	- various files added to the contrib directory. (some from the FAQ)

Changes in standard key mappings:
---------------------------------

none.

New key commands:
-----------------

When at a group selection prompt (ie: shift-G, and so on), there are
two more items on the list.. "b" and "B". These allow you to search
the articles in the group for patterns, and get a new group as a
result.  "b" searches the already selected articles, while "B"
searches all the articles. Note that it is not yet reentrant.  The
search can only be done once.  This would be nice to enhance further.

New control structures in init file
-----------------------------------

none.

New menu sorting methods
------------------------

none.

New variables
-------------

auto-select-rw		automatically select articles you were interested in
body-search-header	does the article body search scan headers too
charset			MIME characterset for posting 8-bit characters
ignore-formfeed		literally ignore any formfeeds
ignore-re		ignore subjects you didnt read last time
subject-match-minimum	how much must match after prefix in match-parts
mouse-usage		enable xterm mouse code


New options:
------------

no new command line options.

Other notes:
------------

There are a huge amount of minor bug fixes in the code.  Too many to
list.  

There were a lot of cases in the original code that seemed to work
more by luck than anything else. There were numerous cases where
uninitialised variables were used and some truly imaginative code
constructs.   After spending many many hours looking through reams of
gcc -Wall output and lint output, most seem to be pretty well plugged.

NN feels more robust now.  It no longer seems to crash as much for
inexplicable and non-repeatable causes...  (although it can still be
crashed it seems).

And please... Stop sending me bug reports saying that nn-6.4.16
core-dump's if you select the letter after the last one on the menu...
If I had a dollar for each one of those I get via nn-bugs@dkuug.dk, I
would be able to make a full-time job out of maintaining NN.. :-)

Plans for the future:
---------------------

NN depends too much on it's pre-defined configuration files.  You
shoudn't need to tell it whether or not there is a stdlib.h include
file.   I would like to include some kind of autoconf type of script
to catch some of these issues.

Supporting both NOV and nnmaster is a problem.  At this stage, the
plan is to remove the nnmaster code altogether.  This makes more sense
as NOV is increasingly being supported, especially with the
proliferation of INN 1.4.

Simple Xwindows support wont be that far off now.  If anybody wants to
write a "proper" implementation, let me know..

True threading:  Once nmmaster is gone, I can do the necessary
adjustments to the selection code to support true threading.

Browser-mode: NN is aimed at a group of people that need to read their
news as quickly and efficiently as possible.  It isn't very supportive
of users who want to "just read some news".  For those people, "No
News" is bad news.  I'm thinking about adding support for a
"see-everything" style mode.. (partly like tin).  This would have to
not interfere with the "normal" usage of NN.  A top-level groups menu
would go along with this, although these two would not need to be
implemented together..

Mailing Lists:
--------------

Bugs:	
nn-bugs@dkuug.dk

Developer/Tester mailing list:
nn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au and nn-request@uniwa.uwa.edu.au
(There is a human answering the -request mail for now (ie: me))

Ftp site:
uniwa.uwa.edu.au:/pub/nn
(There is a beta code directory there, along with patches to 6.4 and
 6.5. there may be a mailing list archive at some point.)

A special thanks to Toivo Pedaste <toivo@uniwa.uwa.edu.au> for
supporting NN by allowing me to run the mailing list there and ftp space.
