readnews considered harmful: CHALLENGE

[Joshua Gordon]

In most every friendly descriptiion of UNIX that I have ever read, some
mention is made of the alleged "UNIX philosophy" of keeping programs
simple by dedicating them to the task for which they are designed, and
nothing else. No listings from the c compiler, right? Well, readnews
is an abomination. A great hairy mess of chronologically kludged routines
doing many things that the shell could do better. Look: we have
	a) a message filter	(show me the head of a file, ask me a question)
	b) a small database to manage (what files have I read?)
	c) an interface to inews for followups

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

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. Using history should
not be necessary.

This is prompted by the abysmal performance (i.e., crash and burn) of 
readnews version 2.10+some on my (admittedly overextended) Altos 586
running version 7 XENIX. If anyone out there has actually made readnews 
work well on such a system, lemme know, but the challenge still stands.


-- 

	from the blithering idioms of josh gordon
	{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!joshua!josh