Re: Balsa as a newsreader?!

[Karol Bryd <kbryd int gnu org pl>]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 08:11:56AM -0700, Matthew Guenther wrote:
> I can't speak for the rest of the development team, but I for one would
> rather not see Balsa do newsreading.  There are several reasons:
> 
> 1) Size.  I want a fast, convenient mail reader, and having a news component
> in there is going to make things bigger and slower.  

As I wrote earlier, most of code of a newsreader is already in Balsa,
message parsing, displaying, composing, 95% of GUI etc. There wouldn;t
be much of new code, nntp i/o is just 15-20KB, simple configuration
window similarly, I think that whole thing would not be bigger than
100KB of source code (am I wrong?).

> 2) Complexity.  We have trouble enough implementing everything a mail client
> needs already, I can't see a newsreading component making things any easier.
> It's taken us nearly two years to get to the features and more importantly
> stability we have now and I'm hesitant to mess it up

I don't want to mess with the main Balsa branch obviously :-) When newsreader
part would be ready and stable then we could think about merge. 

> 3) Alternatives.  There are already many good newsreaders out there, GNOME
> has Pan which is excellent, and there's also NewsFlex, KNews, and KNode for
> example.  I think most of these have done as good a job or better at a
> newsreader than we could expect to do, so why reinvent the wheel?  

I know, there are plenty of newsreaders, but unfortunately there are no
programs (except Netscape, and Emacs of course ;-) that would have
both newsreader and mailer capabilities. Believe me, it's more comfortable
than using these programs separately, even though it may not be so powerful.

> IMHO, a better choice would be to increase the integration between the Balsa
> and existing newsreaders, so people can use whatever combination of mail and
> news reader they like.

Ok, so for now it's 0:1 :-) I'm waiting for opinions from rest of you.

Pozdrowienia (Regards)
-- 
       ------------------- Karol Bryd ------------------
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