Hi all,
As I was not satisfied by my current newsreader (XNews), I tried to use
M as a newsreader. I know that the support for this is very rough, but
I thought that maybe it was worth trying.
So here is a list of things I noticed. Hopefully they may be discussed
a little before storing them in BugTracker and, hopefully, corrected.
Handling of subscribtions
-------------------------
I knew that it was possible to get the list of the groups available on
a particular server, but I had a hard time finding the way to get this
list. The answer is that one must first create a NNTP folder with just
the name of the server, check the 'Has subfolders' option, and then do
a 'Browse subfolders'. Then one can either add all groups (maybe an
option if you have your own personal news server, as I do, but a big
mistake if your server has several thousand groups...) or choose the
ones to add in a tree.
Note the list of groups is asked again to the server each time one wants
to expand a node in the tree (and they are all folded to start with...).
This is obviously useless.
I would recommend the way XNews does this: display a list of all the
groups, with their description, and allow the user to filter this list
using parts of words in the name of the description, initials, ...
Better yet: display the combined list for all servers, and have the user
choose the server from which to get the groups, if there are several).
Another point: currently, if you browse for sub-folders, all the groups
you choose are added in a hierarchical fashion: if you add e.g.
sci.geo.satellite-nav, sci.op-research and fr.misc.droit.immobilier, you
get a hierarchy like this:
My server
|__ sci
| |__ geo
| | |__ satellite-nav
| |__ op-research
|__ fr
|__ misc
|__ droit
|__ immobilier
I would very much prefer something like
My server
|__ sci.geo.satellite-nav
|__ sci.op-research
|__ fr.misc.droit.immobilier
I believe that for most people, it will be much better because there
will be much less 'empty' nodes in their hierarchy (nodes that are not
at all valid news-groups, like sci or sci.geo, or groups that the user
is not subscribed to).
Opening a group
---------------
When one opens a group, the current behavior is to download *both*
headers and then text for *all* messages. Again, this may be correct for
a local server which the user controls, but not for the general case.
Downloading the text of the messages itself is obviously a bug.
Actually, this is because c-client (as we use it, at least) insists that
the exact size of the message must be known even if we are only
interested in the headers. I have a very simple patch, but this prevents
to ever get a correct display for the size (actually, what is displayed
is the size of the headers).
Downloading all headers is an error too: if there are thousands of
messages in a particular group on a distant server...
So I guess NNTP folders should have a 'Max Number of messages to
download on first time'. Again, XNews does that correctly, and surely
many others.
Moreover, I suppose that message headers (and eventually their bodies
when they have been downloaded) could be optionally stored so that
M would become an off-line news-reader. But we are not there yet...
Reading a group
---------------
The problem here is that the only operation that c-client handles on
messages in NNTP folders is to delete a message. So when a group has
been opened, new messages do not become read when the user selects them,
and the only way to get rid of read messages is to answer Yes to the
question asked when leaving the group: 'Do you want to mark *all*
messages as read'. This actually marks them deleted, by the way.
By the way, this question was asked even when leaving a group where all
the messages were already read. This is corrected.
Of course, this is not correct, and NNTP folder in M should be patched
so that messages can be marked read-unread one by one, and the fact that
this status is stored as 'deleted or not' by c-client should be hidden.
The 'Size' column in the folder list should display the size of the
messages in number of lines. My understanding is that this was planned
as such, but the information is not there: while the headers of the
message actually have the information, it is not available in any data
structure that c-client and/or Mahogany handle.
Other stuff
-----------
I suppose that if all the problems above were solved, M could be
considered a news-reader, which is not the case currently. Maybe not the
best one yet, but I suppose that it would not be so difficult to add all
the bells and wistles to make it perfect once the basic features are
present.
PS: the only thing that XNews does not handle correctly is the
'Reply-by-mail' feature: it only allows one address in the 'To:' field,
and no CC or BCC. Maybe not a killer bug, but if we do not eat our own
food, things will not evolve...
Thanks for your interest...
--
Xavier Nodet
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
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