Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!sun!warp!rock
From: rock%warp@Sun.COM (Bill Petro - GSG Marketing)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re^2: Review of NN, a Usenet news reader
Keywords: rn, .newsrc, b&d
Message-ID: <114069@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 6 Jul 89 22:18:29 GMT
References: <1836@papaya.bbn.com> <1150@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk> <4827@freja.diku.dk> <3364@epimass.EPI.COM>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Lines: 53

jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes:

>In article <4827@freja.diku.dk> seindal@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Rene' Seindal) writes:
>>Second, the discussion on the net and on the nn-info mailinglist has (in my
>>eyes) revealed two major problems with nn.  The first is the `Re^n' problem,
>>and I know Kim will change this if he is told often enough.  The second
>>problem is the way nn marks articles as read.  The current scheme is clearly
>>not sufficient, and it will have to be changed, so nn has at least facilities
>>comparable to rn's.  Kim is well aware of this, and are working on it.

>Great.  For me, the primary deficiency of nn is the lack of an
>equivalent to rn's 'M' command -- the ability to flag certain articles
>so they'll hang around and I can deal with them later -- and the ability
>to stop halfway through a group, go read something else, and pick up where
>I left off.  To convert the majority of rn users, nn will need to provide
>this capability.  The news etiquette documents request that people
>read all articles in a group before following up, to avoid duplicating
>other people's words.  rn's 'M' command makes this easy.

I have been quite impressed with nn.  I agree that the only real
deficiency is not being able to stop reading at a point in the newsgroup
and pick it up later.  

There is the "l" command that will enable you to temporarily "mark" or
leave an article (and return to it later) for the expressed purpose of
checking other articles withe same subject before responding.

I was hoping that the ":unread" command would help out with this
"deficiency":

     :unread [ group ] [ articles ]
          Mark the current (or specified) group  as  unread.   If
          the  articles argument is omitted, the number of unread
          articles in the group will be  set  to  the  number  of
          unread  articles  when  nn was invoked.  Otherwise, the
          argument specifies the number of unread articles.


However, how does one know the number of articles one has not read,
since they are sorted by subject (by default) and not article number?
I imagine the user could resort by age or arrival and then count by
hand, but it seems to me that the program probably is tracking the
article number somewhere.  The program could then update the rc file
with this number as the last number read.  This still might not be
satisfactory however, as most users progress through a newsgroup by
subject (rather than article number, as rn does) and the article you
just read might be the third one in (sorted by subject) but the last
article (sorted by article number) thereby losing articles you really
want to yet look at.

Bill Petro - Sun Microsystems, GSG Marketing

{decwrl,hplabs,ucbvax}!sun!warp!rock  Bill Petro