Subject: Pine Looping on Newsreader Failure (long)

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 19:33:05 -0400

I am trying to pass this on to the Pine Development Team as a
possible bug report.  I apologize for posting it, but I cannot use the
normal bug reporting process, because my service provider goofed and
misconfigured the bug reporting screens off the main menu.  (I reported
this to my help desk in early August and followed up on it, but they
still haven't gotten around to fixing the goof.)

    The configuration is Pine 3.94 under SunOS 4.1.4.  News is read via
an nntp server.

    It has happened several times that I will be reading Usenet news
with Pine.  When I finish with one newsgroup, I delete and expunge all
the articles and press TAB to go on to the next group listed in my
.newsrc file.  Normally there is no problem, but occasionally something
has happened in the connection with the news server.  The little task
indicator whirls and whirls, and eventually the connection suffers a
timeout with an appropriate message.  Unfortunately, instead of just
stopping at that point and doing something like returning to the folder
list screen, Pine attempts to GO ON TO THE NEXT NEWSGROUP, where the
same thing happens.  Eventually it would futilely attempt to go through
all my unread newsgroups.

    Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to break out of this deadly
situation short of crudely breaking my dialup telephone connection and
terminating my shell session by brute force.  This, of course, is a
real pain.  Is there a bug in V3.94 such that it will not recognize and
honor Ctrl-C when Pine is trying to open a newsgroup?  Is there some
other way to break out of this situation (even terminating Pine as
such) so I can get out of this kind of deadly embrace?  (If the reply
is to upgrade to 3.95, my service provider has already rejected that
on the ground that 3.95 is buggy, as I mentioned in an earlier post.)

Thanks.
Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

---

From: Linda Emerson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 20:02:12 -0800 (PST)

I've experienced this situation as well, Paul.  The only way out for me
has been to break the line connection and log in again.

...			:			     ...
	               	:: 
    Linda Emerson     \~~~~~/      Caffe' Sumatra
  [email-masked]    C\___/   Twain Harte, California