RE: knews Q.

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

This is from the man page in the section that describes the config file ....
after the part that describes the x resources. You really need to read through
the manual carefully ... all of it.

       Here  is  an  example  of  some settings that will improve
       things over a slow network connection:

       readActiveFile:          False
       retrieveDescriptions:    False
       descriptionsFile:        ~/.knews/cache-%s/descriptions
       fillNewsrcFile:          True

       but note that you will probably want to  read  the  active
       file  and  group  descriptions at least the first time you
       connect to a server.





On 05-Nov-97 Richard G. Roberto wrote:
> 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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