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This is an attempt to document the changes between 2.10.2 and 2.11.
Only the user visible changes will be mentioned here.


The history file is kept in GMT instead of local time.

Distributions are handled differently. Make sure you have "world" as
a distribution in each line in your sys file or you may see no
news distributed to those sites

Man pages are provided and are actually accurate.

The batch program now does a better job of limiting the size of the file
to that which was requested.

checkgroups knows about moderated groups and tells you when
a moderated group is not marked moderated.

The newest version of compress is supplied. Its output can not be
used with older versions of compress. It can decompress the
files compressed by older versions.

A batched ihave/sendme protocol is supported.

encode/decode programs are provided for use with the new c7 compressed
batching scheme for 7bit data links (e.g. x.25)

lockf() or flock() calls are used for locking when available.

"." is no longer considered a separator in the path line. I can now
be used as part of the sitename. (e.g. seismo.css.gov)

A rudimentary (but effective) hashing scheme for the history file is
used on USG systems to speed up message-id searchs considerably.

expire and rnews/inews now use an interlocking scheme so that
there is no danger of them both running at the same time and
corrupting the history file.

expire and rnews/inews check their writes so that if the file system
is full, you wont lose your history file, etc.

A "FASCIST" options is provided to allow a site administrator to keep
certain users from posting to certain groups.

Posting to moderated groups now works reliably. Moderated groups
do not have to have the word "mod" in the group name. It is now possible
for a site whose mailer does not understand internet mail syntax to
define INTERNET and use the From: line for mail replies instead of
the unreliable Path: line.

Message-Ids with "/" in them no longer give inews a coronary.

A more generalize batching scheme is supported. Basically #! anything
will cause rnews to feed the incoming batch into /usr/lib/news/anything
instead of trying to handle it directly. This allows you to run
compressed batching (or other batching) without having to add the
new command name to your uuxqt's list of permissible programs.

readnews "D" always does rot13

In defs.h, if SORTACTIVE is defined, the newsgroups will be presented
in the order of the .newsrc file instead of the order of the active file.

In defs.h, if ZAPNOTES is defined, any notesfile headers that appear in the
body of an article, will be moved into the header.

In defs.h, BSD4_2 should be defined if you are running 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD.

expire works properly with the -r option to rebuild the history file and the
-h option to ignore the history file. The option "-a" has been expanded to
take a newsgroup as the argument to allow you to only archive selected
newsgroups during one run of expire. For example:
	expire -a net.bugs,net.news
would archive anything in net.bugs and net.news and cancel the rest
of the articles according to the defaults.
	expire -a net.bugs.4bsd -n net.bugs
would archive net.bugs.4bsd and cancel the rest of net.bugs

The Date fields are now stored in GMT without the day
of the week. This is to prevent the "Time Warp" problem and simplify
the time zone names. The Date is always displayed in local time.

The layout of the logfile is slightly different to save space.

Notices about unimplemented control messages are mailed to the
local usenet person instead of the person originating the message.

The HIDDENET code from fluke is provided.

New compile time options for inews are:
	HISTEXP
	NONEWGROUPS
	NICENESS
	SPOOLNEWS
	DOXREFS
	MULTICAST
	MMDF
	FASCIST
	ORGDISTRIB
(See the installation manual for details)

All occurences of "sigtrap" have been replaced with SigTrap to get
around brain damage in certain versions of unix.

expire takes keeps articles in the history file for two weeks (default)
after they have expired. This virtually does away with the very
old articles that used to be endlessly looping around the network.

If a cancel message comes in for a non-existent article, the message-id
of the article to be cancelled is put in the history file. This will
have the effect of cancelling the article if it comes in after the cancellation
message.

expire keeps the date-received of articles in the history file, avoiding
opening a file if it is not yet due to be expired.

The lines in /usr/lib/news/sys may be broken into several physical
lines by ending the line with a \. A line beginning with # is a comment

code to handle A news is not included unless OLD is defined.

The Posting-Version, Relay-Version, Date-Received were removed saving
a significant amount of disk space and transfer time.

Summary and Keywords are now handled and prompted for by postnews.

Xrefs is supported for rn users.

Almost everything is now malloced removing many static table sizes.

inews now takes a -o flag to specify organization and a -d flag
to specify distribution

the .signature file is not included if it is over 4 lines long.

inews will reject any article that has more than 50% of the article
as included text (hopefully pushing people to edit their articles)

postnews now does lots of checking and (probably too much) handholding
when posting articles. The intelligent users can remove these checks if they
want.  The inexperienced users can benefit from them.

everything checks for failures on writes to prevent trashing .newsrc or
other files.

On follow-ups, the References line is truncated to the most recent
few references to prevent overflowing some buffers.

recmail now handles Bcc: and includes .signature files.

If the maximum article read in a newsgroup in the .newsrc is > the
maximum article number in the active file, it is reset to the
number in the active file.

The sendbatch shell script now takes lots of options (compression, file size,
etc). See the man page for details.

If UUNAME is defined in defs.h, the software will get the system
name from /etc/uucpname or /local/uucpname.

vnews has been greatly sped up and now mallocs its buffers, so
it can be used on terminals with screens > 24 x 80

cunbatch and csendbatch are gone. csendbatch is replaced by "sendbatch -c"
cunbatch is recognized directly by rnews
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