In message , at 10:03:36 on Wed, 10 Mar
2021, Recliner remarked:
wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:44:44 -0000 (UTC)
Recliner wrote:
wrote:
On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last
year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.



I find NewsTap crashes quite often while downloading messages. As you say,

Sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished product.



Like many apps, it's a part-time one-man product. I suspect that as usenet
fades away, so do the number of potential users, so he doesn't sell many
new copies (and gets no revenue from existing users). But at least the
bug(s) don't seem to be anything to do with your code.

He says:

"If a group has a single thread which reaches a certain depth, then the
whole group and all its threads are affected. NewsTap always stores the
tree structure of a whole group in a file, and so when iOS fails to read
this file because of a single deep thread, then the thread information for
the whole group is missing.

Most groups do not have such deep threads, so most of the time this iOS bug
remains invisible. The groups which I read usually do not have such deep
threads nowadays, therefore I’m not sure when this started."


Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

I wonder if (a bit like the infamous Covid test results being stored in
an Excel spreadsheet) a quick fix would be to write that data in two
files, and glue it back together after they've been read back in.
--
Roland Perry