josh@joshua.UUCP (Joshua Gordon) (06/15/84)
In most every friendly descriptiion of UNIX that I have ever read, some
mention is made of the alleged "UNIX philosophy" of keeping programs
simple by dedicating them to the task for which they are designed, and
nothing else. No listings from the c compiler, right? Well, readnews
is an abomination. A great hairy mess of chronologically kludged routines
doing many things that the shell could do better. Look: we have
a) a message filter (show me the head of a file, ask me a question)
b) a small database to manage (what files have I read?)
c) an interface to inews for followups
but then there is all the crap in readnews that attempts to sort by topic,
that sort of thing.
I challenge everyone out there in netland to come up with a shell script,
possibly (though preferably not) aided by a couple of small programs--say,
one hundred lines max--that will do the major functions of readnews, which
I view as scanning new news items and displaying them if requested, while
at the same time maintaining the .newsrc database. Using history should
not be necessary.
This is prompted by the abysmal performance (i.e., crash and burn) of
readnews version 2.10+some on my (admittedly overextended) Altos 586
running version 7 XENIX. If anyone out there has actually made readnews
work well on such a system, lemme know, but the challenge still stands.
--
from the blithering idioms of josh gordon
{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!joshua!joshguy@rlgvax.UUCP (06/21/84)
> but then there is all the crap in readnews that attempts to sort by topic, > that sort of thing. Not in news 2.10.*, there isn't. A news which does sort by topic - whether done within the program, or with the "sort" command, or whatever - is infinitely superior to one that doesn't, regardless of how much simpler the one that doesn't is. Rating programs purely on their conformance to a "UNIX philosophy", rather than on how well they meet the needs of their users, is incorrect. It is a *pain* to follow a discussion with the current news user interface; the 2.11 interface which sorts by topic has got to be an improvement. > I challenge everyone out there in netland to come up with a shell script, > possibly (though preferably not) aided by a couple of small programs--say, > one hundred lines max--that will do the major functions of readnews, which > I view as scanning new news items and displaying them if requested, while > at the same time maintaining the .newsrc database. It should also supply, at a minimum, the ability to easily reply to a posting by mail or by a followup posting. > Using history should not be necessary. "history"? If you mean the file "/usr/lib/news/history", damn straight it's necessary; a site fed by two or more news sites can receive two copies of an article. Posting both of them would be annoying; the history file is needed to filter out those duplicates. It also is useful for mapping article IDs in the References: list to local article files. Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy