The XVNews Page

This is as official as it gets

XVNews is a Usenet newsreader based on the XView toolkit. It dates from the early 1990s and is getting a bit long in the tooth. It's completely lacking in support for HTML, MIME, XML, drag-and-drop, or anything similar. Some of us still love it.

Current version

The current version is XVNews 2.3.4, released in May of 2002. The following problems observed in version 2.3.3 have been fixed:

When replying to an article whose Subject starts with numerics, no longer drops the numerics.
No longer confused when "Re:" is spelled "RE:" when browsing articles by Subject.
Reference header on followups now maintains chain of message-ids, not just the message-id of the post being replied to.

In addition there have been two minor enhancements:

Setting X_NO_ARCHIVE environment variable causes this entry to be added to header of posts.
Setting NO_ARTICLE_ID environment variable suppresses "In article. . ." part of reference when including article text in followups.

Source distribution is available from this server as xvnews-2.3.4.tar.Z. It has been built and tested:

on Sparc Solaris 2.8, using the "old" makefiles and "CFLAGS=-DOWTOOLKIT_WARNING_DISABLED"
on FreeBSD 4.8 (by Serge Gagnon)

Reports of successful compilation elsewhere are invited.

Note: shortly after the release of version 2.3.4 a preexisting problem with certain NNTP servers was brought to my attention. Briefly, if followups to news articles consistently have bogus Distribution and/or Newsgroup fields your server software responds to XHDR commands in a manner not anticipated by xvnews (although the behavior is not uncommon). If you see this you need to download the patched copy of xv_post.c, replace the one in your source tree, and recompile. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to Don McLachlan for raising the issue and cooperating in the validation of the fix.

Development status and plans

Although no significant further development is planned I do have all of Hans de Graaff's post-2.3.2 development code. Unfortunately my lack of time, limited C skills, and the state of the pre-2.4 trunk (runs, but several functions either broken or buggy) suggest that more tinkering with the 2.3.x branch is about the most you should hope for. Still, if you've got good code, make sure it works based on 2.3.4, send it in, and I'll consider it. I will always accept patches necessary for the latest version to build or run on other Unices, and make them available through this web page.

History

Written by Dan Currie, further developed and maintained by Hans de Graaff. Development work slowed, then stopped after 2.3.2; Hans handed over maintenance duties to Mark Jackson in January 2000. Significant versions:

2.3.4 release (May 2002): Minor bugfixes and enhancements.
2.3.3 release (17 January 2000): This version fixes Y2K problems in xvnews 2.3.2. First official release by Mark Jackson.
2.3.2 release (15 June 1995): This version fixes an additional crash bug in xvnews 2.3.1. Last official release by Hans de Graaff.
2.3.1 internal-only release (10 June 1995): This version fixes some crash bugs in xvnews 2.3.
2.3 release (31 December 1994): The official release of xvnews 2.3.
2.2.1: This small patch fixed several crash-bugs in the 2.2 release.
2.2(1 July 1994): First official release by Hans de Graaff.
2.1 beta patchlevel 4: This is the last version Dan Currie worked on. This version got around quite slowly, because there never was an official release. Rather, it found its way to many FTP-sites.
2.0 patchlevel 2: This was the last official distribution of Dan Currie. Widely distributed.

May 27 2003