ugh.book

102 Snoozenet

I was just trying to catch up on a few hundred unread messages in a

newsgroup using rn. I watch the header pop up, and if the subject

isn’t interesting I type “k” for the kill command. This says “marking

subject <foo> as read” and marks all unread messages with the same

subject as having been read.

So what happens... I see a message pop up with subject "*******",

and type “k.” Yep—it marks ALL messages as being read. No way to

undo it. Total lossage. Screwed again.

—mkl

rn commands are a single letter, which is a fundamental problem. Since

there are many commands some of the assignments make no sense. Why

does “f” post a followup, and what does followup mean, anyway? One

would like to use “r” to post a reply, but that means send reply directly to

the author by sending mail. You can’t use “s” for mail because that means

save to a file, and you can’t use “m” for mail because that means “mark the

article as unread.” And who can decipher the jargon to really know what

that means? Or, who can really remember the difference between “k”, “K”,

“^K”, “.^K”, and so on?

There is no verbose mode, the help information is never complete, and

there is no scripting language. On the other hand, “it certainly seems

faster.”

Like all programs, rn has had its share of bugs. Larry introduced the idea

of distributing fixes using a formalized message containing the “diff” out-

put. This said: here’s how my fixed code is different from your broken

code. Larry also wrote patch, which massages the old file and the descrip-

tion of changes into the new file. Every time Larry put out an official patch

(and there were various unofficial patches put out by “helpful” people at

times), sites all over the world applied the patch and recompiled their copy

of rn.

Remote rn, a variant of rn, read news articles over a network. It’s interest-

ing only because it required admins to keep two nearly identical programs

around for a while, and because everyone sounded like a seal when they

said the name, rrn.

trn, the latest version of rn, has merged in all the patches of rn and rrn

and added the ability to group articles into threads. A thread is a collection

of articles and responses, and trn shows the “tree” by putting a little dia-

gram in the upper-right corner of the screen as its reading. For example: