These are some very old patches and code for B-news to do reasonable locking
of the 'active' file.  You need to fix your news readers to not keep the
'active' file locked, usually by copying the file and then working out of
the copy.  Some of these patches you should just discard, like the
pm_$unix_env and force_unlock_dir stuff, because they're no longer needed
(after sr10).  Don't just blindly apply the patches, understand what they do
first.  Good luck.
