🚀 go-pugleaf

frampton@vicuna.ocunix.on.ca writes:

> It took me about an entire evening to configure Waffle.  Then another
> couple days to get everything working perfectly (cron, phone answering,
> polling, etc.).  About a week to get things *real* nice -- external
> commands, ANSI screens, etc.

is it just me, or are these features you're unlikely to be worried about
in an offline reader?  (no matter what you call it)

my opinion is _still_ that a small amount of work could go into packaging
waffle to make it as easy as possible to set up, which would be used for
leaf sites, and other places where you might otherwise be tempted to
inflict QWK on everyone else.

> CIM, on the other hand, took me a total of 15 *minutes* to configure.

[if you pay me compuserve's rates, I'll write you a similar application
that dials your nearest pay-per-minute place.]  this is about the only
advantage that the brain-dead approaches have over rnews/rmail/uucp -
the ease of setup.  and I think that can be overcome (and would be
_well_ worth the effort).

> It was quite pretty, as well.

I'm told helldiver is quite a nice interface as well.  and it wouldn't
take a lot of effort (a lot of stomach medicine, possibly) to make
uucp `pretty'.  the big thing missing here would be the `download files'
aspect - with uucp, your login _just_ runs uucico - it _just_ transfers
files already waiting.

> Yes, Waffle is powerful.  But not everybody wants to run their own
> site.  I wonder how long the people in the MIS department where I am 
> employed would last if they told all their users that if they wanted to 

AGAIN with the analogies.  
-- 
Russell Schulz  russell@alpha3.ersys.edmonton.ab.ca  ersys!rschulz  Shad 86c