[3354] in SIPB bug reports
changes to xrn, GNUS in sipb locker
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Wed Dec 2 00:08:51 1992
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 92 00:08:11 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU, cfyi@Athena.MIT.EDU, usenet@Athena.MIT.EDU,
I have just installed in the sipb locker new versions of xrn and GNUS.
They will appear some time Wednesday morning, assuming that the daily
release happens properly.
The xrn I just installed is the (supposedly beta) version of xrn 6.18.
It's been in "beta" for many months, and the author claimed he was
going to release it officially a long time ago but has not been heard
from. I decided to stop waiting for him, since all the bugs that I
know of in it are fixed, and since it is a marked improvement over the
previous version of xrn.
Notable new features of the new xrn include:
* Article saving can now save into RMAIL files.
* Prefetching is much more efficient and responsive. It results in a
noticeable performance improvement in many cases (although you are
still sometimes going to see delays, at least until we switch to the
new news servers, when going into a newsgroup with many unread
articles).
* The "onlyShow" resource to only get a limited number of articles
from a newsgroup, even if there are more unread articles than that.
* Support for multiple signature files.
* The "ignoreNewsgroups" resource, which allows the user to specify a
list of regular expressions to match against newsgroups; any
newsgroups that match will be ignored by xrn as if they don't exist.
This is a useful way to trim down the size of one's .newsrc --
delete unwanted newsgroups from the .newsrc, and then add them to
your ignoreNewsgroups resource.
All of these are documented in the xrn man page.
The feature I've added to GNUS is similar to the ignoreNewsgroups
resource mentioned above. See the documentation for the variable
gnus-ignore-newsgroups-regexp after loading GNUS.
It might be appropriate to update the OLH documentation about news
reading to mention the newsgroup-ignoring feature, and/or to make it
into a stock answer, since users are so often asking about how to
reduce the size of their .newsrc files.
I'm not going to add the feature to rn, because I don't want to try to
grok its code; if someone else wants to, feel free.
Here's an example of using the newsgroup-ignoring feature. An X
resource:
xrn*ignoreNewsgroups: ^fj\.,^to\.,\.advocacy$
In .emacs
(setenv gnus-ignore-newsgroups-regexp "^fj\\.\\|^to\\.\\|\\.advocacy ")
Both of these *should* do the same thing (although I haven't actually
tried it :-).
Any questions can be sent to me or to bug-sipb.
--> Jonathan Kamens
IS/Athena Quality Assurance and User Consulting
Member, Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
