news@osiris.UUCP (Phil Kos) (02/07/89)
Howdy, all...
We're running B news 2.11, no patches (don't ask why or tell me I need
to get the patches yesterday, it's Not An Option and I'd rather not get
into why that's so). I like rn pretty well as a newsreader, but the
way it scans article headers to kill articles really aggravates me.
When I'm browsing a group and come across a discussion string I'm not
interested in I always k. If I k the original posting, i.e. the one
that doesn't have Re: in the Subject: header, I find that I almost
always have to kill at least one followup before any of the followups
are killed. Sometimes (particularly in comp.sources.unix) I am forced
to k *every single posting* in a certain string, even when the Subject
header is essentially identical from article to article. (See below
for more details on this.)
Similarly, when I "deposit the pattern" in my KILL file with K instead
of k, I find that K'ing the original does not necessarily cause any of
the followups to be skipped, and K'ing a followup does not necessarily
affect other followups. I can't figure out why the pattern that is
generated does or doesn't work on followups; this behavior does not
appear to be consistent.
I've tried editing the KILL file, making the patterns it contains less
restrictive so that they should match many more headers, but it
doesn't help. From my experience it seems that the patterns deposited
automatically by K should be good enough but they aren't, at least not
consistently. They look like perfectly normal regular expressions;
are they? (Whenever I have edited KILL I always quit out of the news
group and rn, then run rn again from the shell to make sure it reads
KILL, so that's not my problem.)
Can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong? Am I just missing something
fundamental about the way killing articles works in rn, or maybe the way
it generates and uses patterns in KILL? Are there bugs in 2.11 rn that
the first few patches fixed? Does anyone remember?
Phil Kos
Information Systems
...!uunet!pyrdc!osiris!phil The Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore, MD