Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!mordor!sri-spam!rutgers!bellcore!faline!sabre!blade!ras
From: ras@blade.UUCP (R.A. Schnitzler)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Reading usenet inside Emacs
Message-ID: <954@blade.UUCP>
Date: 2 Feb 88 20:40:45 GMT
References: <7651@alice.UUCP> <8801241916.AA23663@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <203@rtg.cme-durer.ARPA> <208@stylus.cme-durer.ARPA>
Organization: Bellcore, Red Bank ,NJ )
Lines: 36
In-reply-to: klm@cme-durer.UUCP's message of 26 Jan 88 22:31:47 GMT

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Fri May 22 1987 on blade (berkeley-unix)


Well, I use a massively hacked/translated/hacked-some-more version of
rnews.ml to read news in GNUemacs (yes, that's correct).  I don't know
who originally wrote it, but I got it about 5 years ago (gosh, is it
that long) from Bruce Israel at umcp-cs (at least then).

As anyone who's tried it knows, ml-convert does not do a very good
job.  However, I've since hacked at it some more so that it seems to
run okay under 18.41.  The massive ugliness of all this is that it is
not *completely* translated (so it still requires mlsupport) and it
uses the standard post-news stuff, and (currently) it still loads
debug, and ...

Why do I do this anyway???  Bruce Israel's rnews.ml used the -e option
to readnews, which is an undocumented flag that seems to continue to
exist.  This flag produces a list of unread news articles, by
newsgroup/art-num and title, using and updating your .newsrc file.
Rnews.ml uses this list of articles like those mail systems that
present you with a list of mail-message headers, and let you
selectively read the messages.  From my perspective, this is a big win
over any of the other gnu news packages.  It also does a variety of
nice, little, (but computationally fairly expensive) things, like
continually updating the mode lines of both the list-of-articles and
the current-article buffers with various (useful) information, like
the poster's name, length of message, etc, etc.

I currently have it working on a fairly heavily loaded 750, and I seem
to have cleaned up enough of the inefficiency to make it usable.
Perhaps someone would be interested in doing some more cleaning on it,
and posting the result...


-- 

"It's worse than that,			Ray Schnitzler
   it's physics, Jim"			Bell Communication Research  
					arpa: schnitz!bellcore.com
					uucp: ...!bellcore!schnitz