The History of the AreaManager for INN+ifmail (it's short name - areafix :)

==== v0.00, ??-??-9?

	It was written by Alex Tutubalin (2:5020/96) in Perl for MS-DOS
(so many later versions contained "#chop #MSDOG" :).
Alex wrote to Sergey Vishnevskiy (2:5020/400): "I've learned
a new language and wrote an area manager while having been learning it".

==== v0.01, april'95

	The first operational alpha-version.
Andrew Kolchoogin (was 2:5020/118.22) was made by Alexey Kshnyakin
(2:5020/118) to learn Perl for a week, and then they made the
areafix work :)

==== v0.02, may-june'95

	The first operational version :)
Andrew Kolchoogin and Alexey Kshnyakin made it from v0.01
just before Alexey's graduating.

==== v0.10, december'95 - february'96

	Yar Tikhiy (2:5020/118) became the next developer :)

1) Areafix was divided into 2 parts: a little program that places
requests in a queue and a queue processor.
2) "+*" is processed correctly now.
3) The list of restricted echoes is handled properly, too.
4) The names of echoes containing metacharacters are handled in a correct way.
5) The list of restricted echoes affects both + and - commands.
6) "Forward" config parameter was added.

=== v0.11, march'96

	It's the version included into ifmail-2.8e package.

1) Areafix logs using syslogd (implemented by Andrew Kolchoogin)

=== v0.5.00, may'96

	Yar Tikhiy began a new version numbering. 0.5 means
"half-release". It's time to finish messing with the areafix.

1) It knows about INN's "default subscription list" feature
(default subscription is '*') and writes '!*' in newsfeeds
if detects empty subscription list.

2) Areafix has to use ifmail's Areas file as the list of areas,
in which newsgroups are gated, so the lines in Areas containing
'*' in area or newsgroup name are rejected (previous version
would have subscribed you to something like 'junk.*' if you
had asked '+*')

3) 'XlatCommand' config parameter has been added. Now you
have ability to tell areafix to translate some users' commands
to other ones. See also 4).

4) '%+' and '%-' command have been added. There is almost no
use of them for users, but they can be used in 'XlatCommand'.
Imagine that some areafix user (i.e. link) sends '+*' to it.
Obviously he wants to get full feed of FidoNet echoes and has
absolutely no desire to receive gated usenet shit. So it would
be the right thing to add the 'XlatCommand +* %+fido7.*' line
to areafix's config file.

5) Now you can tell areafix to restrict an echo for a set of
links by specifying a wildmat(3)-style address pattern. See
also the 'restricted' file.

6) Areafix forwards subscription requests to uplink in a
single letter. Previous versions would have sent a letter per
each nonexistent area.

7) Comments and README are now in bad English :)

=== v0.5.01, may'96

1) Areafix knows about Reply-To: RFC-822 message header line now.
2) It saves messages w/bad header in $QUEUE/bad directory.
3) It sends a correct list on %UNLINKED command.
4) It sends a sorted list on %LIST and %UNLINKED commands.

=== v0.5.02, may'96

1) 'quote_meta' subroutine quotes all metacharacters. Previous version
have quoted only those metacharacters which I had found in echo and
group names, but now it's getting popular to include weird characters
in the names of new echoes.

=== v0.5.03, june'96

1) Because of the subscription algorithm, the subscription to '*'
durated 2 days on 2:5020/400.
So, the algorithm changed to make subscribing to a lot of echoes
much faster (about 300 times).

=== v0.5.04, august'96

1) Now areafix can handle not only FTN links but also NNTP and UUCP ones.
The trouble was that all newsgroup names passed check for their presence
in ifmail's Areas file. Two types of links are introduced now, namely,
FTN and non-FTN. FTN links can see only newsgroups being gated (i.e.
present in the Areas), and non-FTN links see all active newsgroups.
Of course, they can't reference ungated newsgroups by echotag, but only
by newsgroup name.
Futhermore, you can turn off FTN features at all.
See 'config', 'restricted' and 'passwords' files' comments for
more technical details.

2) A bug in list generating functions fixed. Now they output only
active echoes but not all of them from ifmail's Areas.

3) A bug in unsubscribe_from_ngroup() that made it non-functional fixed.

4) A little bug in areaqueue.c fixed.

Thanx to Nick Evgenev for giving the idea for fixes #1 and #2.

=== v.0.5.05
=== v.0.5.06

1) Little bug fixes

=== v.0.5.07

1) Areafix uses gup3w-compatible lock file now
