Fronttalk Discussion

Jan 22 20:05 UTC 2005

This item is for reporting and discussing bugs in fronttalk.

response 2 of 115:

Jan 23 03:19 UTC 2005

I'm currently doing some work on Fronttalk.  Version 0.3.7 will have many
fixes to the "read since" logic.  It will also use "readline" to enable
command-line editing.  There is fix to a bug that caused "slipped in" messages
to be printed inappropriately sometimes.  Better error messages for bad shell
escapes.

There was an item someplace on Grex where various people entered Fronttalk
bug reports, but I can't remember where it was.  I tried to do some searching,
but Grex was being too slow to make this possible.  I should probably try
again now that things are working better.

response 4 of 115:

Jan 23 03:40 UTC 2005

I guess that if we are a login shell, control-Z should be handled differently.
Looks like when picospan is a login shell, control-Z doesn't terminate it,
but it doesn't  work right in sub processes either.  You really don't have
job control when you use the bbs shell.  Dunno if I can (or want to) do
better.

response 6 of 115:

Jan 23 04:58 UTC 2005

The failure to show escape does is a function of the "more" pager on the
new machine.  It expands out those escape sequences.  There is an option
someone described that causes it to not do this.

Norwegian characters are a research problem.

response 8 of 115:

Jan 23 16:27 UTC 2005

Good to hear about readline; that was on my list of things to ask about.

It was me who figured out the trick with `more' and ANSI color escapes.

I remember that there was an item for discussing fronttalk bugs, but I
can't remember what it was now, either, so I entered this one.

response 10 of 115:

Jan 24 18:07 UTC 2005

Is this item just for bugs, or can we talk about features too?

response 12 of 115:

Jan 24 20:26 UTC 2005

(I believe that the person who entered an item can change its title,
using backtalk.)

response 14 of 115:

Jan 26 04:12 UTC 2005

I retitled the item, using the Fronttalk "retitle" command.

I've installed Fronttalk 0.3.7, which fixes a number of bugs including many
"read since" bugs, and some job control bugs.  It adds readline support while
in command mode.

response 18 of 115:

Jan 26 12:54 UTC 2005

A couple of things that Picospan does that are on my wish list for
Fronttalk:

(1) At the "Ok" prompt, the "read" command takes both "new" and an
item number (probably an item range, too) as arguments -- as in
"read new 156", for example -- and leaves you at the "Respond or pass"
prompt.  I use that quite a bit when I want to post a response to an
item that I'm caught up on and don't want to see the previous responses.

(2) At the the "Respond or pass" prompt, "enter" works.  It lets
you enter a new item, then returns you to "Respond or pass" in the
old item.  Handy if you're reading new material in a conference, get
an idea for a new item, and then want to resume reading where you left
off.

(3) At the "Ok" prompt (maybe "rp" too), "display conference" gives you
particulars about the current conference (item directory, number of items,
etc).  (In fronttalk, it currently just lists all the conferences.)

response 20 of 115:

Jan 26 14:22 UTC 2005

resp:17 -

  I recently grabbed a copy of your .cfonce and found it worked perfectly.
  However, there wasn't a "set sane" in there.  Maybe you took it out?  Where
  was it?  Theoretically it is supposed to be first.

resp:18 -

  (1) Hmmm...looks like picospan does that only in the special case where
      only one item is given in the range.  Should be easy enough to
      make that happen.

  (2) This is a trivial change to make in fronttalk.

  (3) This is a deliberate change, having to do with architectural
      differences between Backtalk and Picospan.  In Picospan, to get
      a list of conferences, you do "help conferences".  This is weird,
      since the help command normally shows you manual pages, not anything
      about the configuration of the conferencing system.  But it makes a
      kind of backwards sense because in Picospan there really is no
      computer readable list of conferences, just a manually maintained
      text file that is printed out when you type "help conferences".

      Backtalk needs to be able to parse conference lists, so it can
      display them in pretty tables and stuff.  On Grex it uses a set of
      regular expressions tuned to the format of the manually maintained
      conference file, but on most installs it has a rigidly structured
      confmenu file that is maintained via some administrative web pages.
      Displaying the contents of this with the "help" command instead of
      the "display" command makes even less sense than it did before.

      So, in Fronttalk, to get a list of all conferences on the current
      server, you do:

            display conferences

      This can be abbreviated a lot, like to

            d c

      For backwards compatibility there is a kludge that makes "help conf"
      do the same thing.  However, this means that "disp conf" can no longer
      display information about the current conference.  My solution to this
      was to create a new command:

            display thisconf

      Which gives similar information to the old Picospan "disp conf"
      command.  I figured renaming this relatively uncommon and obscure
      command to make a common and important command more sensible was
      a fair tradeoff, but I was never all that happy with the "thisconf"
      keyword.  Just haven't thought of anything better.

      Incidentally, there are some similar commands for servers.  You can
      do "display servers" to get a list of all the servers Fronttalk knows
      about (rather few, I should at least add M-Net to that list), and
      "display thisserver" gives info about the server you are currently
      connected to.

response 22 of 115:

Jan 26 14:38 UTC 2005

Hmmm...I'm noticing accessing remote conferencing systems (like hvcn) is being
slow and broken.  I wonder if that is just because the proxy is still in the
pumpkin, so http connections out of Grex are going through the bad old DSL
twice.

Hmmm...M-Net accepts connections to backtalk only with "https".  Fronttalk
doesn't talk https.  Probably that is something I should look into.

response 24 of 115:

Jan 26 15:14 UTC 2005

Here are the first eight lines of my .cfonce:

} # here is where you can put PicoSpan customization
} 
} ## Stuff suggested in staff
} set nosource
} set sane
} set supersane
} 
} ## Stuff . . . borrowed . . . from valerie

I use "read n1, n2, n3, n4 new" regularly.  If I repeat an item number or
include an item that has no new responses, I get the RFP prompt for that
item, and the new responses for the other items.

Odd that my .cfonce works for you but not for me. :)