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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!qantel!stv
From: stv@qantel.UUCP (Steve Vance@ex2499)
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: suggested enhancement to rn
Message-ID: <319@qantel.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Nov-84 13:37:13 EST
Article-I.D.: qantel.319
Posted: Sat Nov 24 13:37:13 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 26-Nov-84 02:15:22 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: MDS Qantel, Hayward, CA
Lines: 50

As has been mentioned before, many times, rn is a great program, and
Larry did a super job!  The only thing I miss from vnews, a deficiency
that rn seems to have, is described below.  I will fix this myself,
someday, but in the meantime, I am posting this to see if someone else
has a fix already, or has the time to whip one out before I am able to.

The problem is that if an article is posted to three groups I read, I
get to see the article three times.  Vnews only let you see the article
once, and sometimes not even that many times (as discussed here a couple
of weeks ago).  Example: an article says:

Newsgroups: mod.newslists,net.news

I read the article when I'm reading net.news, and it is presented to me
again when I read mod.newslists.

I never experimented or examined the vnews code to see exactly 
how vnews did it, but it seemed to be something like:

LOOK at the FIRST newsgroup in the list of newsgroups of this article;
    IF it is not the same as the newsgroup we're now reading, 
        DOES the reader subscribe to this newsgroup that IS listed 1st?
            IF so, skip the article--he will read it in that other
             newsgroup--OTHERWISE, show it to him now.

I am not sure that this is the best way to do it, but would settle for
this.  I had in mind something like: 

when the reader has read this article, change his .newsrc to mark it as
read in all groups listed in the "Newsgroups" line.

More direct, huh?  and also more in keeping with the philosophy of rn.
It would be easy to do at my site, too, because I put in the inews patch
to generate "Xref" lines, so that the article in the abovementioned 
example would (and, in fact, does) have a line like:

Xref: mod.newslists:8 net.news:1097

so that the .newsrc file could be changed without reading the history or
log files or anything.  

Hasn't this been bugging anyone else?

Again, I want to stress that Larry Wall is a real pro in writing and
distributing software, and to thank him again for rn.
-- 

Steve Vance
{dual,nsc,intelca,proper}!qantel!stv
Qantel Corporation, Hayward, CA