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From: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: net.news.b,net.news.adm
Subject: Re: rn and .newsrc
Message-ID: <2908@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Jul-86 19:46:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2908
Posted: Mon Jul 28 19:46:11 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Jul-86 00:46:15 EDT
References: <3694@ut-ngp.UUCP> <1150@umd5>
Reply-To: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Organization: System Development Corporation R&D, Santa Monica
Lines: 27
Keywords: rn .newsrc
Xref: mnetor net.news.b:343 net.news.adm:616

In article <1150@umd5> zben@umd5.umd.edu.UUCP (Ben Cranston) writes:
> My personal opinion is that if I resubscribe it would be OK for rn to show
> me ALL the remaining messages in that group, to jog my memory, so it would be
> ok by me to not ever mark items read within unsubscribed groups.  Others may
> argue with this though.  Larry, are you listening?

Yes, by some strange happenstance.  The problem with this approach is that
it does nothing about newsgroups that are subscribed to but rarely read.
There are a lot of people who read news like I do.  I am one of these
terribly unfortunate people who can persuade themselves to be interested in
almost anything.  (This is to be construed as a bug, not an feature.)
In particular, my .newsrc subscribes to many more newsgroups than
I ever get a chance to read.  I just periodically promote or demote various
newsgroups, and read as far as I can through my .newsrc before my ordinary
work comes crashing in on me.  My two newsgroups with the longest .newsrc
lines are net.politics and net.women, about 800 bytes each.  I am interested
in both politics and women.  I have not unsubscribed to either group.
I also haven't read either group in months.  (Some would say I haven't read
my mail in months, which isn't true.  I just haven't answered most of it yet.)

Anyway, back to the subject.  What you're really asking for is two levels of
unsubscription: permanent and temporary.  You can get this semantics by
deleting the lines of permanently unsubscribed newsgroups from your .newsrc.
Rn will not add them back.  (Readnews may, but that's another story.)

Larry Wall
sdcrdcf!lwall