ian (01/31/83)
I'd like to see the ability to specify an alternate .newsrc file parallel to the -f option used in awk, sed and other places. This would allow me to read work-related stuff on company time and non-work-related stuff on my own time; this might make readnews more saleable to managment in companies where management is suspicious that employees are goofing off on company time. We're running an old version of news, so I apologize if this feature (or an alternate way of doing the same thing) is in the `latest' version. Thanks. Ian Darwin, Toronto
jim (02/02/83)
Here is my suggestion as to how readnews can be improved. I have modified our local readnews so that with the appropriate flags it produces a list of articles to be read. The output looks like: net.lan/22 Tue Jan 25 HDLC chips net.lan/23 Mon Jan 31 Ungermann-Bass Survey, Preliminary Results. net.periphs/34 Tue Jan 25 HDLC chips net.railroad/51 Sat Jan 29 Amtrak OK's Bullet Train net.lang/74 Mon Jan 31 XLISP query "readnews -l" doesn't work for this application because it doesn't give enough information to find the file containing the article. With this option it is possible to write your own program to actually read the articles without the overhead of producing multiple copies. For example, I use a set of Emacs mlisp routines to read the news, given the list of articles to be read. I would like to see this incorporated into the distribution.