earle@smeagol.UUCP (Greg Earle) (01/11/86)
I recently switched over to trying GNU Emacs "rnews" as my news reader, instead of vnews. After a while of using it, I have some comments: BUGS - Can't handle newsgroups that are 17 characters long. Every time rnews gets to any of these groups: net.news.stargate mod.computers.sun mod.computers.vax net.sources.games rnews quits (stops) with the diagnostic 'Args out of range: "<newsgrp>", 16' There seems to be a couple of places in dist/lisp/rnews.el where 16 is referenced, but since I'm not a Lisp hacker, I don't know what the reason for it is, nor the one that is causing the problem, nor the fix. This is not only annoying, but the newsgroup name is not displayed, and you have to suss that it quit back to command mode, so you have to hit 'n' to get it back going again. * = > 'ads', 'sundar', 'mly' - are you listening?? < = * I believe the problem germinates inside the function news-set-mode-line (~ line 330); it's the only place where '16' is used. - Like all the discussion we've been seeing about 'rn' recently, 'rnews' unfortunately displays ALL instantiations of a multi-group posted article. I do not know if the fix for this has anything to do with the 'inews' patch mentioned as curing 'rn' ills. - 'rnews' is not compatible with 'vnews'. The worst part seems to be that if you have used vnews, and used the 'e' option in it to mark an article as unread, then your .newsrc file will reflect this as net.pornography 1-(x-1),(x+1)-20315 where 'x' is the number of the article you marked unread. 'rnews' comes along, and as soon as it sees an article number after the '-', decides that you haven't seen articles x through 20315, and proceeds to start showing them ALL to you. If you panic and exit, .newsrc will have '1-x' in that newsgroup field. COMMENTS - It seems to run unbearably slow. Read all unread news some time (so checknews returns nothing), and then make 1 article readable, down near the bottom of your .newsrc file. Run 'vnews', and see how long it takes to get to that article. Exit from vnews (so .newsrc isn't updated), and run 'rnews' from emacs. Compare the times. If you have newsgroups with many articles in them (I don't expire net.emacs, so there's a lot of them :-) it appears 'rnews' goes over every article (time to pass through group is definitely proportional to # of articles in directory), instead of looking for the last read one from the .newsrc and advancing from there. - I don't see what good the 'g' option is; it appears to do what is done by default - look for the new unread news. - When all groups have been read, an 'n' returns the cryptic 'No previous news groups' - how about 'No more news groups'; or 'Done'; or ? WISH LIST - The main thing I miss is the 'e' vnews command to mark an article as unread - it's handy for reminding yourself of an article you want to work on (like a net.sources shar) but you can't get to it right then. - I would prefer that the buffer percentage displayed on the mode line reflect the position of the bottom line displayed, not the top where point is. It is strange to page an article and see '30%', then the next page you see only a few lines with signature. Unfortunately I presume that 'rnews' mode must be consistent with the rest of Emacs in this regard. - When 'prefrobnicating' the news groups, it would be preferable if the group that was currently being 'prefrobnicated' (look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls :=) was displayed on the mode line, instead of the last group processed. As I stated above, I have some groups with many many articles in them. When it gets to net.unix, it looks like it died, because nothing happens for a long while as it goes through > 1000 articles (on my system) and all I see is 'net.text [x/x]' on the mode line while it is doing this. - I wish the command syntax was more like 'vnews' ; it is easier to remember 's' or 'w' for save w/|w/o header then it is to remember 'o'. Also, 'h' for 'header' is easier than 't'. I would also prefer 'q' to exit and update .newsrc, and reserve '^\' for exit-no-update, because the norm is to update .newsrc and 'q' is easier to remember. - I consider the 'a' option (add a newsgroup) dangerous. - How can you read net.jokes without a (vnews 'D') de-ROT13 command?? - vnews 'p' (go to parent article) is a great idea, although it rarely works in practice. All right, all right, this is getting picky... Lest you think otherwise, this article is intended to be constructive commentary/criticism on a part of what I consider to be a *GREAT* product (I have volunteered myself to beta-test new versions on Sun-2's for RMS). It's just that these things are more annoying than other elements of the editor that I use from day to day (and heaven knows, I give rnews plenty of workout everyday :=). I hope people find this useful. Lastly, on the same subject, is there any way to use "undigestify-rmail-message" on a digested news article from mod.whatever? No matter where point is, I get "Wrong type argument: integerp, nil" on attempted execution. Does it require parameters? If so, of what type? Sorry this is so long ... Greg Earle JPL Spacecraft Data Systems group sdcrdcf!smeagol!earle (UUCP) ia-sun2!smeagol!earle@cit-vax.arpa (ARPA) -------------------- Know Your Culture: "Dog Bites, Horse Cries"; LP by D.I. (Or was it the other way around?) Pedigree of band includes Casey Royer and Rikk Agnew, formerly of the Adolescents (Both)/Christian Death (Rikk)