Hello Kevin!

28 Jun 05 16:37, Kevin Klement wrote to Mike Tripp:

 >> Correcting the distribution errors or
 >> manually verifying SEAL.INI?

 KK> Both... :) Do I edit both or just one, specifically.

Ideally, you would've known about the syntax bugs in the distribution files
and manually made both corrections before you started.  Those strings are
used as default templates for area creation, but you can customize them. 
I'm guessing you must've already done that for the ;Echospec line, or you'd
probably be having trouble with all uplinks.  The other is a ;Filespec line
and you're not concerned with FileFeeds right now.

 KK> Do I just edit "seal.ini" and then run seal386 update?

 KK> Which files do I edit specifically?

SEAL.INI looks like any old ASCII-based text configuration file such as
BINKLEY.CFG.  SEALCFG.EXE is a nested menu configuration program like you
find in FD or IREX.  Most config programs accept the user input and then
produce a cryptic binary file (which you little hope of fixing if
corrupted) that the main program uses during execution.  SEALCFG actually
just updates the ASCII text to SEAL.INI and SEAL.EXE parses SEAL.INI on
each execution run.  So you have the option of using the config program
w/pretty user interface and/or editing the ASCII directly with your text
editor or batch logic.

If you make changes in SEALCFG, it automatically replicates any changes
that are necessary out to the other CFG files that are impacted...namely,
SQUISH.CFG and TICK.CFG.  If you make changes directly to the text in
SEAL.INI, you have the extra step of running SEAL UPDATE to force the
replication of those changes out to the impacted files.

Troubleshooting the setup through the menued front-end can be difficult
because you are only accessing one attribute/field of one specific record
on the screen at a time.  Discrepancies can be a lot easier to spot in the
ASCII file itself where there is only one long line per nodelink/feed and
all of the lines of the same type are grouped together into consecutive
lines and you can see all the working ones right alongside the one you're
having trouble with.  Even new link setup can be simplified with some
copy+modify:  I want Joe to work just like Frank, except his address=xxx,
his password=yyy, and I will flag his areas with Z instead of A.

So fire that editor up and search your way to the string
"ECHOFEED" and see what's different about your entry for the
newsgroup feed address as compared to the others that are working.  It is
probably something as simple a non-existent path or a missing trailing
slash, etc.  Don't let the runtime error make you think that the code is
hosed.  Robert was more concerned about getting features implemented and
bugfixes in, and planned to spruce up the error-handling later after the
feature-set stabilized...but became one of those famous "lost the
source in a drive crash" and "dropped out of Fido soon
after" stories instead.

.\\ike

--- GoldED 2.50+