Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1+some 2/3/84; site joshua.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!vaxine!wjh12!genrad!decvax!harpo!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!vax135!houxz!houxm!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!joshua!josh From: josh@joshua.UUCP (Joshua Gordon) Newsgroups: net.news,net.unix,net.flame,net.misc Subject: readnews considered harmful: CHALLENGE Message-ID: <137@joshua.UUCP> Date: Fri, 15-Jun-84 12:39:19 EDT Article-I.D.: joshua.137 Posted: Fri Jun 15 12:39:19 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 20-Jun-84 00:50:58 EDT Organization: Foxglove Systems, Berkeley, CA Lines: 30 In most every friendly descriptiion of UNIX that I have ever read, some mention is made of the alleged "UNIX philosophy" of keeping programs simple by dedicating them to the task for which they are designed, and nothing else. No listings from the c compiler, right? Well, readnews is an abomination. A great hairy mess of chronologically kludged routines doing many things that the shell could do better. Look: we have a) a message filter (show me the head of a file, ask me a question) b) a small database to manage (what files have I read?) c) an interface to inews for followups but then there is all the crap in readnews that attempts to sort by topic, that sort of thing. I challenge everyone out there in netland to come up with a shell script, possibly (though preferably not) aided by a couple of small programs--say, one hundred lines max--that will do the major functions of readnews, which I view as scanning new news items and displaying them if requested, while at the same time maintaining the .newsrc database. Using history should not be necessary. This is prompted by the abysmal performance (i.e., crash and burn) of readnews version 2.10+some on my (admittedly overextended) Altos 586 running version 7 XENIX. If anyone out there has actually made readnews work well on such a system, lemme know, but the challenge still stands. -- from the blithering idioms of josh gordon {ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!joshua!josh