🚀 go-pugleaf

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References: <4894@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
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Reply-To: guido@mcvax.UUCP (Guido van Rossum)
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Organization: "Stamp Out BASIC" Committee, CWI, Amsterdam
Keywords: digests

Yes, I know this subjectis supposedly beaten to death, but I believe
there may be life in the old dog yet.

I'd like to make a plea for breaking up digests.  My main problem with
digests is that you have to read all of them at once, and you can't save
fragments.

Let me explain my usual style of reading news.  I'm on USENET, using
the UUCP news software, so I don't have to fight notefiles or mailing
lists -- everything is a newsgroup.  I'm using Larry Wall's wonderful
'rn' program, which makes it very easy to manipulate lots of newsgroups
and lots of articles.  I read about 40 different newsgroups, mostly
technical, some with a very low traffic volume, several carrying 10-30
articles per day.  I have set up things so that rn presents me the
groups in roughly my preferred reading order, so that when I have
little time I'll see at least important local messages and a few of my
highest interest groups.  When I start reading a newsgroup, I must wade
through a lot of swine to find a few pearls; I believe that a subject
is not sufficient to select so I like rn's ability to print the few
first lines of the article (at 1200 Baud) or its whole first page (at
9600 Baud).  Notably boring subjects (e.g., legal issues or pricing
discussions) get 'killed' by subject.  Information that may come in
handy later, and source code, I save in a special directory.  Articles
that look interesting but are too long to read when I'm in a hurry get
'Marked' so rn will present them again at a later time.  I hardly ever
send articles to the printer.  I tend to read small bits of news and
then go back to work for a while, so I'm relying on rn's superior
ability to remember what I've already seen, even across newsgroup
boundaries.  When I find too many articles in a group (say, more than
100) I use rn's '=' command and 'junk' the really uninteresting ones all
at once, or to peek at only a few interesting-looking items before I
'catchup' the newsgroup.

Now the problems with digests:
1) even though sometimes the list of subjects at the start gives a clue
that I might skip the whole digest, usually it's not clear at all, so I
have to read it all.  (However, more and more the titles are of the form
'Re: digest nnn xxx').
2) once inside a digest, most of rn's abilities are useless.  It doesn't
know which sub-items I've read already, it can't easily skip to the next
or previous sub-item, it can't easily show the list of subjects, I can't
randomly jump to a sub-item, I can't save a sub-item to a file, and
(last but not the least hassle) it doesn't save any status until a next
visit of the digest.
3) replying or following-up to an item in a digest is difficult because
'rn' can't dig the reply-address, article-id, subject etc. out of the
digest.

And a request to the moderator of mod.mac: even though mod.mac may share
its existence with a mailing list where digest format is preferred,
can't you undigestify it before posting to mod.mac?  Surely this can be
done completely mechanically, but it should be done at the time of the
posting, not at the time of reading.

Any other opinions (votes?) are welcome; post or mail as you see fit.

-- 
	Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@mcvax.uucp>