On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, David Sewell wrote: > With the (relative) burst of traffic on this mailing list, I thought I'd > ask folks the question in the message subject. The old farts among us > can remember the ancient days when trn was unseating tin as the > newsreader of choice (at least that's the switch I made), but these days > I'd guess that among people who used text-based newsreaders in a *nix > environment, slrn has >90% of the usage. Just checking > news.software.readers on my server right now, I see 134 posts about slrn > and 1 about trn. - Trn was around way before tin. It was an extension of the original rn which was one of the very first widely available newsreaders. Or at least it was the only one I ever saw before about 1991 or so. > > I try out slrn every now and then but never seem to get captivated by > it. It doesn't seem to have the lightning-fast ability to select, > deselect, and junk using regex expressions on a variety of criteria that > trn4 has. (Maybe I'm wrong; I've never explored all of slrn's feature > set.) I don't like split-window display of newsgroup subjects and > message text, so I'm happy with a program that is either at group level > or in the article text. And of course I'm lazy enough not to want to > switch if there's no strong reason to. > > Others? > - Every now and then I'm tempted to switch to using GNUS mode in emacs, but I've got way to many trn commands hardwired in my hands. I hear good things about mutt if you want to go the combo news/mail route. >From mattack@vax.hanford.org Wed Jan 22 11:23:12 2003 >slrn is the one that does scoring right? If someone would give a fairly >high level compare/contrast between slrn and trn in this thread, it'd be >nice. (I realize it'd likely be biased towards trn, just like asking >tivo vs replaytv is biased in each particular system's newsgroup!) > >If I'm right about scoring -- basically I have never needed the scoring >feature. - Trn has had scoring available for nearly ten years now. I suspect I'm the only person using it. > >I like trn because, especially when I transferred, it was a superset of >rn. (I presume slrn is that too.) > > >So basically -- I guess trn was the first newsreader after rn that I used >significantly that had new features and wasn't a huge change interfacewise, >unless I wanted it. - Trn and rn have always been the same program, you just got a different behaviour depending on how you set it up. > >Things I wish trn had, in no particular order: >* Better makefiles/build rules. > >* Simpler configuration. > >* Better documentation -- maybe this exists, I dunno.. > >Also, shouldn't trn 4.0 go "final" some eon? Can't some half-finished >features be removed or documented that way or somesuch? We've been using >it for years and years and years.. It'd be nice just to say it's 4.0 final.. > - Trn is basically abandonware at this point, I don't think anybody's seriously hacked at it in the last 8 years. If you want all these support things you'll either have to organize them yourself or pick a more supported news reader. - Booker C. Bense ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Scholarships for Techies! Can't afford IT training? All 2003 ictp students receive scholarships. Get hands-on training in Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, Linux/UNIX, and more. www.ictp.com/training/sourceforge.asp
