Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!vrdxhq!dgis!csed-1!roskos
From: roskos@csed-1.UUCP (Eric Roskos)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: A news reader was posted to comp.sources.unix
Message-ID: <275@csed-47.csed-1.UUCP>
Date: 18 Feb 88 16:07:57 GMT
References: <1851@botter.cs.vu.nl>
Organization: IDA, Alexandria, VA
Lines: 23
Summary: vnews too

In article <1851@botter.cs.vu.nl>, ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
> There was a news reader program posted to comp.sources.unix a couple of days
> ago.  After the tty driver gets fully debugged, there may be lots of interest
> in reading news directly on MINIX.  Anybody interested in taking a look at
> this news reader and evaluating its potential for MINIX?

[Personal opinion follows!  Your opinion may be opposite.]

I hope if someone does this they will also consider looking at the
'vnews' sources that come with the Usenet news distribution; after
installing and trying to use [on Unix] the above news reader here for
about a week, I've decided that it is more useful for quickly looking up
some article you remember in the past than reading the news.  It has a
lot of familiar 'vnews' commands missing, takes a long time to start up,
and once it's shown you a list of articles, seems to assume you've read
them even if you haven't.  But, as I said, this is just opinion.

I used to have 'vnews' running under DOS back when I received news on
the PC, it is not that hard to port; it took about 3 days I think... the
one that comes with the news distribution is *not* the enormous, slow,
machine dependent one that requires 'afbuild' to build a big hash table
of the articles, etc.
-- 
Eric Roskos, IDA (...dgis!csed-1!roskos or csed-1!roskos@HC.DSPO.GOV)