🚀 go-pugleaf

kpc> (but if you _do_ want to start hacking, modifying a newsreader to do
kpc> virtual newsgroups would be great.  (and probably not too hard in
kpc> gnus.))

If I understand correctly what you mean by "virtual newsgroup," then there
is no need to hack. Gnus can be made to read from any directory that has
the struture of a news spool area, so you could easily use it to read your
old news. Note that each article has to be in a single file, however.

I used this scheme for a while to keep old information, but switched to VM
instead as my information browser. My gripes with the gnus-based strategy
were (i) unless one modifies the code, reading an article marks it for
deletion (hardly what one wants to do with archived information), 
(ii) No easy way of searching through a whole pseudo-newsgroup (i.e.,
cluster of information) unless one uses grep, and (iii) results in too many
small files (on a large disk the minimum filesize causes you to use quite
some diskspace).

I am not completely satisfied with the VM based approach either, so I would
love to hear from other people how they deal with archiving and retrieving
of acquired information.

Cheers, Thomas.

--
Note: The address below is valid until Jan 15, 1993.

+--------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Thomas Weigert                 |                                 |
| Machine Inference Section      |                                 |
| Electrotechnical Laboratory    |                                 |
| Umezono 1-1-4, Tukuba-shi      | weigert@{mcs.anl.gov,etl.go.jp} |
| Ibaraki 305, Japan             | +81-298-58-5918 (phone+fax)     |
+--------------------------------+---------------------------------+