🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <819414802snx@holly.demon.co.uk>, Mark Rogers
<mcr@holly.demon.co.uk> writes

..
MR> disincentive to me. An option to have the mail/news stored in a standard
MR> text format (albeit with binary index files) would be much appreciated.

When I first saw the way Snews stores its news files, I
thought "Ugh, how crude!".  Yet, as time goes by, I find
it more and more to my taste, and hard to think of a
scheme I'd prefer for my own use.

MR> Something for the wishlist for future versions?

On Wednesday, in article <HBP0T5B1pC2wEA46@turnpike.com>
     richard@turnpike.com "Richard Clayton" wrote:

RC> No. It was one of the fundamental design decisions. The cost would be

Fair enough.  There've certainly been times when my
Snews newsbase has taken my disk down to its last
few meg, so an organisation that doesn't have duplicate
copies of cross-posts, and compresses the text, has
undeniable benefits.

Personally I'm always a little worried about compression,
the way that, on the rare occasion when it does fail, it
fails catastrophically.  I'm one of those who's never let
Stacker/Doublespace/etc near my drives, no matter how much
the extra room would be welcome.

However, even without knowing the details, I think that
Turnpike made the right decision for most users.

..
MR>  This is
MR> fine for as long as Turnpike does everything the user wants, but an
MR> experienced user it is likely to be very frustrating.

RC> If what they want to do makes sense (not necessarily the solution they
RC> propose, but the problem which they want solving); then it will be
RC> sensible of us to tackle it.

I agree with Mark because I find it hard to see how you
can possibly cater for the wierd desires of a user (experienced
or not) equipped with source and programming ability.
I've hacked Snews for my personal use to solve:

1. How do I get a mailing list to thread sensibly (i.e. by
   subject) when every subject line starts "(SC22WG14 msg xxxx)"
   before the actual topic?  The 'xxxx' is a unique message
   number created by the reflector.

2. I like to have 'unusual' header lines drawn to my attention,
   but I don't want to see run-of-the-mill headers.  So a
   line like "Summary:" or "X-Beer-Token:" is displayed for
   me.  Whereas something like "X-Newsreader: Turnpike"
   (congrats on how commonplace it's becoming!) is easily
   concealed.

3. I'm currently tinkering with my 'name'.  At first everything
   went out from 'john' (unless I manually amended it) even if
   it was a reply to mail to a different user (I have several
   dozen 'users' at wash.demon, to keep track of different
   mailing lists, support, etc).  Now I reply using the 'user'
   that was addressed.  But even that is proving not as flexible
   as I wish.  Eventually I'll have it to my taste.  For a
   while.

But I find it hard to imagine that any of the wishes
I've described are shared by more than a tiny minority
(often a minority of just one).  Would you want to
tackle any of the above, Richard?

MR>  I'm sure, however,
MR> that Demon have made a good choice on the basis of what they were trying
MR> to achieve; the fragile newusers should be a lot better off.

RC> There's a remarkable number of non-fragiles using it too.

I don't doubt it.  I imagine Mark's reference to fragility
was to some of the earlier Windows newsreaders available
for Demon users.  Put it like this: after I tried a free
Windows newsreader and had it trash my newsbase (the only
time ever) I reckoned I'd paid far far more than I wanted
to!

--
John Washington