Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!pyramid!comdesign!pst
From: pst@comdesign.CDI.COM (Paul Traina)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: vn verses vnews
Message-ID: <542@comdesign.CDI.COM>
Date: 14 Oct 88 16:18:28 GMT
References: <442@mfgfoc.uucp>
Organization: Network Equipment Technologies, Santa Barbara, California
Lines: 49

From article <442@mfgfoc.uucp>, by exodus@mfgfoc.uucp (Greg Onufer):
< From article <539@comdesign.CDI.COM>, by pst@comdesign.CDI.COM (Paul Traina):
<> the reading of groups one at a time (a *big* loss of vn is that it scans
<> and reads every message header in every group at once.  This is bogus
<> behavior)).
< 
< Depends on the operating system you are running, actually (it always
< comes down to that, doesn't it? :-)  If you have job control, vn's
< mis-feature becomes a win... it is intelligent enough not to do
< stupid things in the background during its news gathering phase, like try
< to output to the terminal!  Thus, one merely starts it up, suspends it,
< then places it in the background while one reads his/her mail.  It
< will eventually attempt I/O when it is finished and you get a little
< blurb from your shell ([1] Stopped Output   vn  -- or whatever) and
< you then place the job in the foreground.  But that's only on my home
< machine, here at work with Sys V, I just have to wait and wait and wait!

I have job control, and I still think it's a loss.  It happens to be a great
"option" -- i.e. "When I login in the morning, I'll stuff vn into the background
and when I'm done reading my mail, it will be ready..."  Unfortunately, my
mind is sometimes serial (smile), and I want to read news >now<.  yarn's
method of compiling subject lists as necessary (e.g. when you first enter
a newsgroup for that invocation) entails minimal "apparent" overhead without
the long startup period that VN has.

In other words, what I'm trying to say is, yes, with job control it's not as
much of a loss, but sometimes people don't act the same way computers want
to act.  (especially on monday morning, when I'm faced with 3 days of new
news to read (smile)).

						Paul

< Now if someone would get vn to behave like vnews with cross-postings,
< behave like rn with kill-files, and sort the headers, life would be 
< wonderful.  Anyone up to it?

If eri[ck]@snark's visual news reader isn't up to snuff (I haven't seen it,
so this is not a comment against it, or anything even smelling of that
nature) then I will probably dig into VN and add kill files and cross-posting
knock-out features.  I am somewhat pleased by the xrn program, but w/o source
(it's on ucbvax in binary form for vaxen and suns) I refuse to become attached
to it.

< 
< -Greg
-- 
Paul Traina				To believe that what is true for
{uunet|pyramid}!comdesign!pst		you in your private heart is true
pst@cdi.com				for all men, that is genius.