Hallo Everybody!

I'm glad I finally found this echo. I am very interested to get in contact
with whoever is the maintainer of MsgEd presently. I thought it was Arthur
Clarke, but he never answered to my crashmails and then left Fidonet ...
:-(.

I have invested quite some time to do development on MsgEd 4.10 and I am
intersted to fold my changes into the MsgEd mainstream. When I started
working on the sources of MsgEd 4.10, I thought I was the only one doing
so, but if I look at your tearlines here I was obviously wrong ;-)

What I did with MsgEd was basically to fix a LOT of bugs and implement some
features that I needed before I could even use the editor.

To give a short list of the changes compared to the 4.10 release:

Features
--------
- Full support for CHRS kludge according to FSC 0054. This is very important 
  to me, because the german national characters are represented with 
  different ASCII codes in the different character sets (like IBMPC for OS/2,
  LATIN-1 for Unix, and MAC for Macintoshs).
- A lot of improvements of the FidonetInternet Gateway features of MsgEd.
  My MsgEd now is fully compatible with the Gatebau-Standard from Martin
  Junius. It will recognise Reply-To:-Lines, allow Internet-Followups, e-mail-
  Replies to Newsgroup postings, e-mail CC's, etc. With that, it is now 
  really possible to *seamlessly* use internet and fidonet together with the
  same editor.
- Added the possibility to continue an interrupted area scan (like Alt+T 
  versus Alt+S im TimEd).
- Possibility to sort the area list by various criteria, and other cosmetical 
  improvements of area list.
- Support for the usage of Environment-Variables like %MAILBOXDRIVE% in
  the msged.cfg. Useful in LAN environments with different drive letters of
  the same ressource on different machines.
- AKA matching. (Someone just requested it, eh? )


Fixes
-----
- Fixed lots of Year 2000 problems.
- Fixed spontaneous segmentation violations (twice a week or so ...) of 
  the OS/2 version that were due to a 32bit16bit conversion problem in 
  os2scr.c.
- Fixed gross memory segmentation of DOS version. I now have 250K free with 
  the 16 bit DOS version even though I have 300+ areas defined. :-)
- Fixed mis-adressing when replying to netmail because of erroneous nodelist
  lookup.
- Fixed e-x-t-r-e-m-l-y slow scanning speed of fastecho.cfg. It took one
  minute on my system before, now it takes five seconds. Also other 
  fixes and improvements when reading a fastecho.cfg.
- Fixed some small memory leaks.
- Fixed bugs in and improved speed of the ansi.c interface (for running
  MsgEd in a VT220 session). I'm currently doing more changes to make
  MsgEd really usable on a FreeBSD machine that has an OS/2 message base 
  mounted via NFS.

After I found out that there were other people developing on MsgEd as well,
I got the sources, and merged  in the changes from 41-42b1.dif and
42b1-b2.dif into my source code, so my MsgEd also has all features of 4.20
Beta 2. I refrained from merging in 4.20 Beta 3, because it is said to be
unstable, and stability is my primary concern.

I would very much like to see my changes integrated into the MsgEd
mainstream. I will probably continue to keep my own branch of development
up, but I think that the mainstream should profit from these changes as
well.

I still need a few days to finalize my current development effort (some
more Unix fixes, and some more testing). After that, I could also offer to
make a GNU context-style difference file of my version as compared to 4.20
Beta 2, in the hope that it can be applied without too much manual work to
the latest mainstream sources.

So whoever the maintainer is - I hope he reads this mail and I will now
finally come in contact with the other developers. :-)

Viele Gruesse,
Tobias

--- Msged/2 TE 04 (pre)