guido@boring.uucp (Guido van Rossum) (05/05/86)
Summary: Expires: References: <4894@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> Sender: Reply-To: guido@mcvax.UUCP (Guido van Rossum) Followup-To: Distribution: Organization: "Stamp Out BASIC" Committee, CWI, Amsterdam Keywords: digests Yes, I know this subjectis supposedly beaten to death, but I believe there may be life in the old dog yet. I'd like to make a plea for breaking up digests. My main problem with digests is that you have to read all of them at once, and you can't save fragments. Let me explain my usual style of reading news. I'm on USENET, using the UUCP news software, so I don't have to fight notefiles or mailing lists -- everything is a newsgroup. I'm using Larry Wall's wonderful 'rn' program, which makes it very easy to manipulate lots of newsgroups and lots of articles. I read about 40 different newsgroups, mostly technical, some with a very low traffic volume, several carrying 10-30 articles per day. I have set up things so that rn presents me the groups in roughly my preferred reading order, so that when I have little time I'll see at least important local messages and a few of my highest interest groups. When I start reading a newsgroup, I must wade through a lot of swine to find a few pearls; I believe that a subject is not sufficient to select so I like rn's ability to print the few first lines of the article (at 1200 Baud) or its whole first page (at 9600 Baud). Notably boring subjects (e.g., legal issues or pricing discussions) get 'killed' by subject. Information that may come in handy later, and source code, I save in a special directory. Articles that look interesting but are too long to read when I'm in a hurry get 'Marked' so rn will present them again at a later time. I hardly ever send articles to the printer. I tend to read small bits of news and then go back to work for a while, so I'm relying on rn's superior ability to remember what I've already seen, even across newsgroup boundaries. When I find too many articles in a group (say, more than 100) I use rn's '=' command and 'junk' the really uninteresting ones all at once, or to peek at only a few interesting-looking items before I 'catchup' the newsgroup. Now the problems with digests: 1) even though sometimes the list of subjects at the start gives a clue that I might skip the whole digest, usually it's not clear at all, so I have to read it all. (However, more and more the titles are of the form 'Re: digest nnn xxx'). 2) once inside a digest, most of rn's abilities are useless. It doesn't know which sub-items I've read already, it can't easily skip to the next or previous sub-item, it can't easily show the list of subjects, I can't randomly jump to a sub-item, I can't save a sub-item to a file, and (last but not the least hassle) it doesn't save any status until a next visit of the digest. 3) replying or following-up to an item in a digest is difficult because 'rn' can't dig the reply-address, article-id, subject etc. out of the digest. And a request to the moderator of mod.mac: even though mod.mac may share its existence with a mailing list where digest format is preferred, can't you undigestify it before posting to mod.mac? Surely this can be done completely mechanically, but it should be done at the time of the posting, not at the time of reading. Any other opinions (votes?) are welcome; post or mail as you see fit. -- Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@mcvax.uucp>
laurie@cybavax.UUCP (Laurie Moseley) (05/18/86)
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I agree with the recently expressed views from Guido about the desirability
of breaking up digests. I know that the purpose of a digest is to put things
together. However, I expect that many other people have the same problem
that I have. Lines 321 - 347 of a 600 line digest are the ones which are
really useful. Of course, one can save it and then delete the unwanted lines.
The purpose of using computers though is to save trivial effort.
Having said that, I'm very glad to receive the stuff at all, and would like
to express my thanks to the unsung heroes and heroines who put in all the
back-stairs work. The gripes which you get are a good example of praising
with faint damns.
Laurie Moseley
--
If you have skill, you have power.
If you have power, you need responsibility.
Never demonstrate one without the other.