paul@actrix.gen.nz (Paul Gillingwater) (01/02/91)
Now that typical news feeds have close to (or in excess of) 1,000 active news groups, it's becoming a little unwieldy for programs like rn and trn to manage them. I don't mean the actually reading process -- that's pretty efficient -- but rather the selection of news groups, particularly if you've just started. At present the g command must be used with the full name to subscribe to a news newsgroup. To unsubscribe, we must first select that group, then use the 'u' command. But this must be done several hundred times to make the feed of a manageable size! Then of course there is the natural growth, with news newsgroups coming in all the time, (the m command is useful here, to move groups around, but is confusing to non-UNIX users -- why should $ be end and ^ be top? Yes, I know, but beginners don't.) For this reason, I have started writing a news selector program, that will work with the .newsrc of rn and trn, and will show groups in hierarchies (as they are organised.) For example, if the user is not interested in comp.binaries.*, they will be able to deselect them all in one command. New users will see only the top level hierarchies (minus some selected by the sysop, e.g. junk, control, to.*, vmsnet, etc.). The most important part is that I have included the use of a file containing descriptions of every single newsgroup and hierarchy. When the program starts, it builds a single data structure from /usr/lib/news/active, $HOME/.newsrc and /usr/lib/news/newsgroups (this last contains the descriptions). My intention is that this program can be called from a BBS or from the UNIX command line to edit the .newsrc in a user-friendly manner, organised in hierarchies and groups, with descriptions of each newsgroup and hiearchy. Later, I plan to write more code to actually read news. Question: has anyone done similar work that they wish to share? Of course I will be posting my code once it has been reasonably debugged, in case it proves useful to others. Please don't send me e-mail asking for copies of the work-in-progress. I will also send it to a nearby archive site for anonymous ftp when it is ready for release. Any suggestions on the user interface and comments on how it should operate (plus features) will be greatly welcomed (and acknowledged in the code). -- Paul Gillingwater, paul@actrix.gen.nz
zane@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Sameer Parekh) (01/04/91)
To manage the .newsrc at first why don't you just edit with your favorite editor? (Turn the !'s into :'s. . . and move it around.) -- zane@ddsw1.MCS.COM