msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) (01/27/85)
I proposed, a couple of weeks ago, to remove a number of groups in the ont and can distributions -- that's Ontario and Canada -- that seemed to me to duplicate netwide groups. For instance, there is ont.singles and net.singles. I assumed that the people who would read ont.singles would be interested in the same things that were in net.singles, and could therefore post to net.singles with "Distribution: ont" if appropriate. One response seemed sufficiently interesting that I am bringing it, and my reply, to netwide attention by cross-posting to net.news. Ian Allen (idallen@watmath.UUCP) writes: > What news software lets me read net.singles and see *only* articles > posted to the Ontario distribution? > > That is, if/when someone announces an ont.singles party, how can I tell > someone to "read net.singles" to find out about it without forcing them > to read everything in the Universe? (Solutions that don't use the > existing news software, i.e. READNEWS or RN, aren't useful.) Yes, there is a way in the rn interface. rn allows you to define a "local kill file" for each group, by entering that group and typing control-K. Just make a kill file like the following, which assumes that you are interested in distributions ont and wat (Waterloo) only. /Distribution: ont/h:M /Distribution: wat/h:M /^/j When you enter the group, new articles since the last time you entered it will be scanned. All articles will be junked, then the desired ones will return. Then you type a p to reenter the group if you wish; since the articles have been scanned once, they don't vanish this time. And if you want to read the netwide articles today after all, just note the number of the first one as it is junked, say 666, and do 666-$m. This would be easier if rn's pattern command had an option to act on lines NOT matching the pattern, like the v command in qed. Something like /Distribution: ont/n:j is what we really want. You there, Larry? I'm not suggesting that there is never a purpose for local groups matching netwide groups; I'd never suggest eliminating can.politics. But I do think there should be some kind of distinction in the subject matter. Let Distribution: take care of distribution. { allegra | decvax | duke | ihnp4 | linus | watmath | ... } !utzoo!lsuc!msb Mark Brader also uw-beaver!utcsrgv!lsuc!msb