Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!blake!ogccse!littlei!omepd!merlyn From: merlyn@intelob.biin.com (Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: reading netnews in GNUemacs Summary: A Gnews user speaks Message-ID: <4069@omepd.UUCP> Date: 16 Jan 89 19:09:42 GMT References: <2908@uvacs.cs.Virginia.EDU> <361@mqws2.fed.FRB.GOV> Sender: jeffe@omepd.UUCP Reply-To: merlyn@intelob.biin.com (Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge) Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via BiiN, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA Lines: 43 In-reply-to: m1tag00@fed.frb.gov (Tim A. Grunwald) In article <361@mqws2.fed.FRB.GOV>, m1tag00@fed (Tim A. Grunwald) writes: | We have been using Gnews to read netnews from spool files for | the last month. It is flexible and powerful within the Gnu Emacs environment. | There are a few complaints. First, Gnews can be *painfully* slow. | It takes incredibly long to go from newsgroup to newsgroup. I don't | see why it should take so long, but I have not checked the code. | Second, novice users get lost very easily. Many incorrect or | ill-timed responses die ungracefuly (messages like "nill, stringp"). | It is easy to recover if you know to just ignore the message and use | "g" to go to the next newsgroup. | | Has anyone else had the same problems? | Have we installed it incorrectly? | Is Gnus better than Gnews? I have been using Gnews for about 5 months (ever since the local administrators began turning off the newsreader binaries during the day, but don't tell them that.... :-). I have found it to be occasionally slow, but never much slower than plain-ole' editing. The early versions of Gnews had a lot of obscure error messages. Version 2.0 fixes most of the problems that *I* ran into, but maybe part of that was that I know not to do some things now. I like the superb flexibility (hook-kills are awesome), and the true rn-like nature. I did not see that in the version of GNUS that I tried, and have thus stuck with Gnews. Gnews is also well documented. The 'texinfo' manual is very complete, with many examples, and Gnews will drop into the appropriate portion of the manual when asked for help. (Disclaimer: some of my bug fixes actually made it into the code too, so I am a bit biased, being a "part-author". :-) Give it a try. It comes via anonymous ftp from somewhere. Make sure you have 2.0... accept NO imitations! -- Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 on contract to BiiN (for now :-), Hillsboro, Oregon, USA. or ...!tektronix!biin!merlyn HEADER ADDRESS MAY BE UNREPLYABLE if it says merlyn@intelob.biin.com ... Standard disclaimer: I *am* my employer!