RE: knews Q.
On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, George Bonser wrote:
> On 04-Nov-97 Richard G. Roberto wrote:
> > Can anyone explain to me in plain, simple english, what I
> > need to do to get knews to only subscribe to the 5 news
> > groups I've subscribed to?
>
> You will need to download the active file ONCE and can cache it afterwords.
After suffering through the man page, I didn't find this
anywhere, leaving me to believe that you're wrong.
>
> > I can't
> > afford to keep mucking around with it this way.
> >
> > Any pointers would be welcome.
> >
> > Thanks
>
> All of what you ask are explained in the manual pages.
The man page (singular, and enourmous) reads like the XT
programmers guide -- not for the faint of heart IMNSHO.
I was hoping for some friendly advice instead of having to
subject myself to that level of cruelty. So much for that.
It turned out not to be all that bad towards the end though,
but getting there was rough.
> Stop wasting time
> mucking around and start reading. You are going to need to edit options in the
> config files that knews creates for each news server.
I can remember when the tone on debian-user was much
different. It was what set us apart from RedHat and Caldera
& friends. Not anymore, obviously. Oh well.
For anyone else interested in using knews but uninterested
in wading through the XT oriented man page, I wound up
having to redefine my newsrc file for my nntpserver because
it was shared with another news reader that kept filling it
with every news group available. This is not an issue if
you only use knews, of course ;)
I then had to insert the correct group entries into the new
newsrc file defined with the newsrcFile: declaration in the
config file for my nntpserver (e.g. in
~.knews/config-nntpserver, newsrcFile: ~/.newsrc.server)
Then I needed to set the following items to False:
readActiveFile: False
tryListActive: False
retrieveDescriptions: False
checkForNewGroups: False
Now it works reasonably well, except it ignores $NNTPSERVER,
which is documented, albeit stupid. It also ignores the
Xresource setting for Knews.nntpServer if set with xrdb,
forcing you to either select the server at startup, or set
everyone's server globally in the app-defaults file.
Note that I think the knews application is documented in
extreme detail, and that's not a bad thing. But it really
needs a simple "how to" style man page for the rest of us as
well, in my view. In fact, the end of the man page is the
part that should be either split out, or moved up to the
top. FWIW, this is a pretty cool news reader, now that its
configured correctly.
Cheers,
--
"Until we extend the circle of our compassion to all living
things, we will not ourselves find peace" -Albert Schweitzer
Richard G. Roberto
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