rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for 101keep the list private (e.g., by not putting it on the list-of-lists), the list will
soon grow and cross the threshold where it makes sense to become a news-
group, and the vicious circle repeats itself.
rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for ............................................
Like almost all of the Usenet software, the programs that people use to read
(and post) news are available as freely redistributable source code. This
policy is largely a matter of self-preservation on the part of the authors:
- It’s much easier to let other people fix the bugs and port the code;
you can even turn the reason around on its head and explain why this
is a virtue of giving out the source. - Unix isn’t standard; the poor author doesn’t stand a chance in hell of
being able to write code that will “just work” on all modern Unices. - Even if you got a single set of sources that worked everywhere, dif-
ferent Unix C compilers and libraries would ensure that compiled
files won’t work anywhere but the machine where they were built.
The early versions of Usenet software came with simple programs to read
articles. These programs, called readnews and rna, were so simplistic that
they don’t bear further discussion.
The most popular newsreader may be rn, written by Larry Wall. rn’s doc-
umentation claimed that “even if it’s not faster, it feels like it is.” rn shifted
the paradigm of newsreader by introducing killfiles. Each time rn reads a
newsgroup, it also reads the killfile that you created for that group (if it
existed) that contains lines with patterns and actions to take. The patterns
are regular expressions. (Of course, they’re sort of similar to shell patterns,
and, unfortunately, visible inspection can’t distinguish between the two.)
Killfiles let readers create their own mini-islands of Usenet within the bab-
bling whole. For example, if someone wanted to read only announcements
but not replies, they could put “/Re:.*/” in the killfile. This could cause
problems if rn wasn’t careful about “Tricky” subjects.
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 1992 01:14:34 PST
From: Mark Lottor <[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: rn kill