Bug#4538: slrn trashes newsgroups.dsc

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.preferred.com>]

Package: slrn
Version: 0.8.8.4-1

I guess this is the fault of a wrapper the maintainer put around slrn.
Sometimes when I start up slrn, it says:

[joey@kite] ~>slrn
It's older then 5 mins
Global newsgroupdescription-file is out of date.
Getting new one in background.
..

Unfortunately, what it ends up doing is replaceing 
/var/lib/slrn/newsgroups.dsc with an empty file.

I have NNTPSERVER set to a newsserver that requires authentication before
it will let you do anything. I accomplish the authentication via a
"nnrpaccess..." line in my .slrnrc. When the wrapper spawns slrn to go get
the newsgroups.dsc file, for some reason slrn doesn't look at my slrnrc to
find the password it needs to authenticate me.

The other problem is, I prefer to get my newsgroups.dsc file off of a
different newsserver that's slower, but has descriptions for more
newsgroups. And I tend to edit newsgroups.dsc by hand to add a few more
descriptions to it.

So the wrapper around slrn is bad news to me all around.. I just run
slrn.real myself, but then some user will come along and run slrn, and
it'll erase the newsgroups.dsc all over again, which is a real drag. There
should be a config file that will let the sysadmin turn off the use of the
slrn wrapper program entirely. 

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -lisubstr($_,39+38*sin++$y/9,2)=$s # jeh22@cornell.edu
for($s='  '||McQ;$_='JOEY HESS 'x8;print){eval$^I} #         Joey Hess
               "true - do nothing, successfully" - - true (1)