readnews considered harmful: CHALLENGE

[guy at rlgvax.UUCP]

> but then there is all the crap in readnews that attempts to sort by topic,
> that sort of thing.

Not in news 2.10.*, there isn't.  A news which does sort by topic - whether
done within the program, or with the "sort" command, or whatever - is infinitely
superior to one that doesn't, regardless of how much simpler the one that
doesn't is.  Rating programs purely on their conformance to a "UNIX philosophy",
rather than on how well they meet the needs of their users, is incorrect.
It is a *pain* to follow a discussion with the current news user interface;
the 2.11 interface which sorts by topic has got to be an improvement.

> I challenge everyone out there in netland to come up with a shell script,
> possibly (though preferably not) aided by a couple of small programs--say,
> one hundred lines max--that will do the major functions of readnews, which
> I view as scanning new news items and displaying them if requested, while
> at the same time maintaining the .newsrc database.

It should also supply, at a minimum, the ability to easily reply to a
posting by mail or by a followup posting.

> Using history should not be necessary.

"history"?  If you mean the file "/usr/lib/news/history", damn straight
it's necessary; a site fed by two or more news sites can receive two copies
of an article.  Posting both of them would be annoying; the history file
is needed to filter out those duplicates.  It also is useful for mapping
article IDs in the References: list to local article files.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy