🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1993Jan9.022528.8181@news.uiowa.edu> mtpins@icaen.uiowa.edu (Michael T Pins) writes:

>pb@idca.tds.philips.nl (Peter Brouwer) writes:
>
>>There is a bug in nn causing group names to be lost in the the .newsrc file.
>>There is a news group comp.lang.c!!. 
>>When a unsubscribe is done on this newsgroup the .newsrc file loses the
>>newsgroups beneath the comp.lang.c!! line.
>>I solved this by disabling the group in the GROUP file.
>
>There certainly shouldn't be a newsgroup called comp.lang.c!!, as a ! is
>the unsubscribe mark in every major newsreader.  There is a comp.lang.c++,
>which shouldn't cause any problems.  If you do have a comp.lang.c!!, it's
>bogus and should be nuked.

While this particular case may involve a bogus newsgroup, there really
is a bug here (and a particularly nasty one, if you ask me :-).  I
reported this here some time back (and got no response :-).  In my
case, the bug appeared when the same group appeared in my .newsrc
twice, first unsubscribed (i.e. with a `!'), and then subscribed (i.e.
with a `:').  When I ran nn, everything in my .newsrc after the
unsubscribed line for that group was deleted.  While it is
questionable whether the same group should appear twice in the
.newsrc, certainly there should not be massive deletions from the
.newsrc if it does happen.

-- 
Milt Epstein
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois
epstein@cs.uiuc.edu