slrn-0.9.8.1 fails with s-lang-2.0.5

[Richard A Downing]

The current svn instructions fail as follows:

...
if gcc -Dunix -DSLRN_LIB_DIR=\"/usr/lib/slrn\"
-DSHAREDIR=\"/usr/share/slrn\" -DSYSCONFDIR=\"/etc\" -I. -I. -I. -I.
-I../intl        -g -O2 -MT art.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/art.Tpo" -c -o
art.o art.c; \
then mv -f ".deps/art.Tpo" ".deps/art.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/art.Tpo";
exit 1; fi
art.c: In function 'slrn_search_article':
art.c:759: error: storage size of 'st' isn't known
....
more errors...

The first error is for a declaration:

SLsearch_Type st;

but I can't find ANY declaration of SLsearch_Type in any file of the source.

Dan Nicholson says: Judging by the name, I'm guessing it's an SLang function, and the API has probably changed since slrn-0.9.8.1 released Oct. 2004. Yeah, I found it in slang-2.0.5/src/slang.h. Browsing the CVS of slrn, it looks like someone by the name of JED submitted a bunch of patches for slang 2 support. I think this is the one you're choking on:

​http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/slrn/slrn/src/art.c?r1=1.66&r2=1.67

NOTE: slrn is about to be released with utf-8 support, it might be better to wait for that than bust a gut fixing this. I confirm that the cvs compiles and runs with s-lang-2.0.5.

R.

[dnicholson@…]

Checking out the distros, Debian and Gentoo are using 0.9.8.1 but requiring slang-1. Fedora is using this development snapshot which enables slang-2:

​http://slrn.sourceforge.net/patches/slrn-0.9.8.1pl1.tar.gz

The snapshot is from 2005-02-17. Checking out the mailing list, the slrn maintainer says that 0.9.8.2 will be released sometime after he finishes his Master's thesis at the end of March (2006-03). Here's a link to that post:

​http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9756057&forum_id=4003

So, we could probably wait since people don't like to use developer releases.

[dnicholson@…]

The patches in the snapshot to get S-Lang2 support are from the S-Lang author, JED. I may try to backport these patches since slrn is slowly maintained.

[alexander@…]

Why not just replace slrn with Tin in the book? This will also close ticket #1847.

[dnicholson@…]

I really don't use news readers. What's your experience with slrn vs. tin, not from a locale coverage perspective? If tin meets or exceeds slrn functionality-wise, then I would replace slrn.

[alexander@…]

I use only basic functionality of news readers (read, follow thread, mark threads that I have read at work as read at home, reply). Both Tin and SLRN have this functionality.

Both Tin and SLRN can filter articles using a killfile, and Tin can edit it using the menu.

[dnicholson@…]

I pulled out the CVS diffs pertaining to S-Lang2 and UTF-8. The patch is a monster, 74kB. It builds, but I'm not on a UTF-8 aware terminal to test it out right now.

​http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~dnicholson/slrn-0.9.8.1-slang2-1.patch

Options are to use this patch or the development version sited above. Posting on blfs-dev.

[dnicholson@…]

Alright, everything works as far as I can tell. Actually is pretty nice despite the fact that I know none of the keybindings. I subscribed to the blfs-dev news feed on Gmane. A mind-boggling number of posts over its' history. There are 13294 posts in the blfs-dev history right now. Wow. That puts my contributions to this project in perspective. :)

Anyways, I'll give this until tomorrow to see if anyone wants to object to the patch before commiting it.

[dnicholson@…]

After some discussion about the actual UTF-8 ability of slrn on blfs-dev (​http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-dev/2006-April/014532.html), it was decided that slrn would be removed and TIN added. See #1847.

Ticket resolved in r5895.