			    KNOWN PROBLEMS
			    --------------

Here is a collection of some of the problems people have had with
installation and operation of nn in the past.  


			    NNTP PROBLEMS
			    -------------

Other problems with the current NNTP support are described in the NNTP
file.

			PROBLEMS SENDING MAIL
			---------------------

Some people have experienced problems sending mail.

The unfortunate thing about this is that the report about the problems
is sent to the user *by mail* - sort of catch-22.

The most common cause of these problems is that the definition of
REC_MAIL in config.h is not correct.  Either it is an invalid path or
program name, or the command does not read its standard input to
get the letter (for example, MMDF's `post' command wants the letter in
a file).  The 'inst' script will check that the REC_MAIL and INEWS
programs exist, but not that they actually work.

In another case, uux was not silent causing the trace file (in the aux
script) to be non-empty which fooled nn to think that nothing had been
sent (although it did).  If you get failed reply/follow-up messages
look for a line saying something like "uucp job XXXXX" - This is
caused by the environment setting JOBNO=ON.

In one case, the recmail program was corrupted.

Also notice that some recmail programs may treat a line consisting of
a single period in the first position as end-of-file.

If you don't have any program which can be used as recmail, there is
one possible candidate in the contrib/ directory.


		       ACCESSING NEWS REMOTELY
		       -----------------------

I have received the following problem description which seems to
indicate a network problem.  You can now set the variable

	retry-on-error

to the number of times nn should try to open an article (you may
want to do this in the global init file!):

   We are running on a VAXstation 2000, with the news accessed
   remotely, so I get a lot of "can't read" errors.  It seems to
   me these errors should ALWAYS require acknowledgement before
   clearing the message, and should offer the possibility to
   re-try the operation (which usually then works for us).

		    GROUPS BECOME OR REMAIN EMPTY
		    -----------------------------

It has been observed on a few occations that some groups are not
collected correctly.  We have seldom managed to track down the actual
problem, but in practically all cases, NNTP and/or NFS has been
involved, either accessing the news spool files remotely, or nnmaster
updating the database on another machine, or both.
In any case, don't hesistate to tell me if you see this problem with
release 6.5.


			TERMINAL I-O PROBLEMS
			---------------------

nn does not echo the characters you type except when you are entering
a string, e.g. a file name.  Instead it attempts to make a significant
change to the data displayed on the screen.  On a slow system this may
be seen as a drawback; on fast systems it is an intended feature!

If CBREAK is available, nn will use it, but when CBREAK is not avaiable
nn uses raw mode when reading from the keyboard and cooked mode when
printing on the screen (it flips forth and back).  [This behaviour can
be disabled by unsetting the flow-control variable]  This has caused
problems on some systems (e.g. the 3B2) where the tty driver is
located on a dedicated IO-processor, which for some reason handles
ioctl's "out of band".  I have tried to work around these problems by
outputting \r\n sequences where \n should have been sufficient.

nn also intentionally discards type-ahead at certain points, but only
if CBREAK mode is not supported, and the flow-control variable is set.

On some systems, TCSETAF also flushes the output queue; you may try to
replace it by TCSETAW followed by TCFLSH.

On terminals where the arrow keys send single characters, nn will not
recognize the arrow keys as arrows if they send a character which is
already recognized by nn for another purpose.  For example, on the
wyse 50, the left arrow key sends the same code as the backspace key
which is the default erase-key.  Therefore, the left arrow key will be
interpreted as the erase-key.  (This is contrary to 6.3 where the
normal function of the erase-key was - erroneously - inhibited and
interpreted as the arrow key).


				Cnews
				-----

nn wants articles to contain Lines: headers, but Cnews doesn't
generate these in the default setup.  You may uncomment the
Lines: code in the inews script.

The requirement for Cnews to update the 'min' field in the active
field has been removed in release 6.4 onwards.  INN does update the
'min' field be default.


			FORMATTING THE MANUALS
			----------------------

Many versions of the -man package may have problems handling the `@'
characters as hanging tags (.TP).  Fix your man package by
substituting ALL occurrences of the @ character in tmac.an (or perhaps
tmac.an.new) by a BEL (^G) character.


			       RESIZING
			       --------

Resizing only works with termcap (on BSD systems)!  It may also work
on System V, but then you will probably also have to define the symbol
SYSV_RESIZING in config.h (see term.c).

If resizing occurs while reading an article, the article is repositioned
on the first page of the article.

			    8 BIT SUPPORT
			    -------------

I am rather embarrassed to admit that a program leaving Denmark in
1990 still does not fully support 8 bit character sets - however, that
is the plain truth.  Currently, all characters typed on the keyboard
are stripped to 7 bits, but articles displayed on the screen can be
shown either in 7 or 8 bit mode via the data-bits variable.

With patch #6 installed, nn does indeed support 8 bit input if
data-bits = 8.  However, the positions 0x80 through 0x9f are reserved
for internal use, so only the various ISO 8859/* character sets are
*fully* supported, while some PC code pages may overlay some national
characters with function keys.


			     MAIL RECORDS
			     ------------

There are some things you have to consider in connection with the mail
and news record files:

 - When you :mail to yourself, a copy is not saved in the mail-record.

 - If the mail/post fails, the message is saved in ~/dead.letter instead

 - Since the posting is performed in the background and it may take
   upto a minute to complete posting an article, updating news-record
   will not happen instantly.


			 OLD AWK vs. NEW AWK
			 -------------------

Some scripts will not run with 'new awk'.  If your system's `awk' is
the new awk, you must define the symbol OLD_AWK to the path name of
the old awk program (normally `oawk').  See s-template.h.

