Re: On the newsreader subject

[Szekeres Istvan <szekeres cyberspace mht bme hu>]

On Fri, Feb 06, 1998 at 12:17:11PM -0600, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
>    If someone is going to implement a newsreader (and I think Pista has
> some code, do not know in which direction), they should probably look
> at the design of the GNUS newsreader.

Yes, I've started working on a gnome/gtk based newsreader. At the moment
only some very basic functions are working (downloading newsgroup list,
article list, htmlifying and showing articles). And only the NNTP protocol
is supported. I intend to check the work into the CVS tree when I reach
basic usability, maybe in a few days.

> GNUS has a lot of backends for reading news/mail: some do nntp; some
> do free-agent like newsreading; some let you browser a mbox file as a
> newsgroup (ie, read your mail with this); there is an MH backend; and
> a bunch of other methods.

with a good architecture this is very easy to implement. But OTOH I think
the mail reader is to read mail, not the news reader. What's the point in
extending a news reader to able to read news? Isn't that what's CORBA for?

> I would like to see the GNOME newsreader/mailreader to be based on
> something like this.

I will try my best :)

> There are a bunch of different tasks to be done for a newsreader,
> which makes it easy to split the task of writing the newsreader into
> various pieces, so hackers can start working at the same time in
> different parts of it:
> 
> 	- Backends: we probably should reuse the existing GNUS design
> 	  as it is.
> 
> 		- NNTP backend

that is partly implemented

> 		- mbox backend
> 		- MH backend
> 		- dir backend
> 
> 	- newsgroup listing: methods for subscribing to new
> 	  newsgroups, list newsgroups, classify newsgroups, browse
> 	  news server contents, support for multiple news servers;

ditto:)

> 	  
> 	- Group display: this gets a list of articles;  does scoring
> 	  based on the rules defined by the user;  does GroupLens
> 	  evaluation;  does picons display;  

this needs working

> 
> 	- article display: once an article is retrieved, it removes
> 	  extra headers; adds header/quotation coloring; it does
> 	  mime-decoding; and sticks the result on a gtk-xmhtml widget.

mime decoding needs work, the rest is functional :)


Pista