gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (05/29/86)
I applaud Bob McQueer for releasing "vn", though I'd like to point out a
few things for people who haven't tried it.
It came up pretty easily on my Sun (4.2BSD, 68020), modulo some zero
pointer problems (wrote it on a Vax, eh Bob?). However, the
documentation says that it does not rewrite your .newsrc unless you ask
it to. THIS IS WRONG! Before you even unpack the sources, make a copy
of your .newsrc -- because "vn" will trash it. It does not understand the
idea that you might have seen an article before and might want to see
it again -- so it wipes out all record of such articles. It also
changes the article numbers of newsgroups that you have "banged out"
with ! instead of : in your .newsrc -- so that if you do resubscribe to
them, you will not see the news that's sitting in the spool area.
The documentation does mention some of this but doesn't warn about the
trashed .newsrc's.
I found the user interface clumsier than vnews -- you have to keep
track of what prompt you are at, because the same keys do different
things depending on the prompt. And you have to do cursor motions to
go down a page, but hit return to go to the next page, etc. The basic
idea is good but the user interface is rough in spots.
It WAS good for scanning a group that I haven't read in months and weeding
out what I wanted to read. But it wouldn't let me just mark those
messages as unread and go back to them in vnews later, having done
its filtering job.
It'd be nice if it could build its database in the background while you
are reading the first group or two. Instead, it makes you wait until
it's done scanning every group, before it will let you read any group.
Try it, you might like it ---- but be sure to back up your .newsrc!
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
May the Source be with you!