whm@arizona.UUCP (08/28/83)
A few days ago I posted a message asking if anybody is using emacs-rnews
to read the news. Well, quite a few people are using it and I think
this is great because it's the best news reading system around that
I've found.
The purpose of this article is to make available a news sorting program,
sortnews, that (I_ think) makes emacs-rnews much more pleasant to use.
sortnews reads readnews -e output and Newsboxes and produces a sorted
Newsbox. The sorting is done on several levels: if the user has file
Messages/Newsgrouplist, sortnews produces the groups in the order
specified. Any groups not specified in the file are produced in
alphabetical order. (The group list is currently literal, but I hope
to add simple wildcards soon.) Inside each group, articles are sorted
by the date-posted and are grouped by topic. The topic grouping is
rather primitive, it associates all articles whose titles have the
same two "important" words. Then, it takes the earliest posted
article and produces it and any associated articles ordered
by date. This continues until all articles in the group have been
produced. sortnews uses a different method for digest articles and
attempts to produce them ordered by volume and issue.
That's the good news I suppose, but here's the bad news:
- readnews hacks
- rnews.ml hacks
- you need an Icon system
- it could be faster
readnews is hacked to produce date-posted information in the -e output.
This is only a one line hack in rfuncs2.c, but the readnews -e output
is 90 columns wide. To hide the extra information in the Newsbox, it
appears past column 80 and long-line wrapping is turned off. In addition,
rnews.ml doesn't do a "readnews -e", rather, it runs a shell script
which updates the Newsbox. sortnews is in Icon (about 150 lines),
and thus you'll need an Icon system to compile it. Also, it takes a
little while to do it's job. While the time is certainly dependent
on Newsbox composition, an on-the-spot benchmark took 40 secs of
cpu on a 780 to sort a 300 line Newsbox. I don't find the time to
be a problem; when I login, I fire off the shell-script normally run by
rnews.ml and then subsequently invoke rnews with a prefix argument.
So, as you can see, sortnews is not ready for the casual user. But, if
you like hacking up things, you might be interested in it. So, rather
than post it to the group, I'll ask that anyone who is interested in it
send me a letter and if I have any takers, I'll bundle it up and mail
it off to whoever.
Bill Mitchell
whm.arizona@rand-relay
{kpno,ihnp4,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whm