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From: johnc@haddock.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.software.notes
Subject: Re: Current notes or sequencing vnews or ...?
Message-ID: <429@haddock.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Apr-87 13:56:45 EST
Article-I.D.: haddock.429
Posted: Tue Apr  7 13:56:45 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 10-Apr-87 04:38:37 EST
References: <403@haddock.UUCP> <1674@lsuc.UUCP> <6122@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: johnc@haddock.ISC.COM.UUCP (John Chambers)
Distribution: na
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 55
Xref: utgpu news.misc:247 news.software.notes:23

>>>The one nice thing that people have to say about 'notes' is that it knows
>>>how to group responses (followups) with the base note, and lets you sequence
>>>through them as a sublist.  The versions we have of 'rn' and 'readnews' and
>>>'vnews' don't seem to do this.  
>
>>RTFM. It's been a feature of rn since rn came out. It's the -S
>>option. For simplicity, set RNINIT to all the rn options you want
>>(or to the name of a file which cotains the options).
>
>Perhaps YOU should read the manual.  This isn't what the -S option does.  It
>causes article search to scan forward for an article with the same
>*subject*.  If the followup arrives before the article to which it is a
>response, you will get them in reverse order.
>
>Unfortunately, about a third of the replys I see have no "References:" line,
>which means that it is impossible to link them up properly anyway.
>
Hi; me again.  I'm the sucker that started this one.  After a bit of a
search, I found the manual page, so I finally *could* RTFM.  It's true,
the -S option isn't nearly as nice as the way notes does it.  The article
and responses are all sort of jumbled together in any order, with the
article not necessarily first.  Also, notes has the '-' command that
backs up one response, and the '=' command that returns to the original
article from any response.  I find I use these a lot, and so far I can't
figure out how to get rn to do them.

Also, notes has a 'S' command which is like the 's' command, but it stores
the entire chain of articles (original + responses) to a file.  I use this
much more than the 's' command.  TFM for rn doesn't seem to describe any
command that does this.

OK, so I'm maybe asking for yet more bells and whistles on a program that
is already too big and bulky.  And I admit that rn has some goodies that
are sorely lacking in notes.  I'm not demanding anything of anybody.  I'm
just noting that the folks around here are using both of these user agents,
and are not really perfectly satisfied with either.  Even their strongest
partisans give each one lukewarm praise at best.  It seems that maybe it
would be useful to publicly compare them, and say what makes each a good
user agent, and say what is clumsy about each.  

Maybe also someone will speak up and say "Do I have the program for you!" 
I'm not married to rn or notes or vnews or ...; they just seem like the
main contestants in a rather limited field.  They are all good programs,
but like Ford's Model T, we can hope they will be superseded by something
even better.  [I hope we won't be as disappointed by news agents as we 
have been with cars. :-]

I especially like the idea of merging mail and news agents.  They really
do very similar things, after all.  Why have two slightly different tools
for slightly different jobs, when maybe one general tool will do?  [Well,
yes, I do have more than one screwdriver, now that you mention it.]

-- 
	John Chambers	(617)247-1155 <...!ima!johnc>
[The above opinions are my own; for a small fee, they can be yours, too.]