Re: New Xnews.

In news.software.readers on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:32:48 -0400, Mike
Yetto <mike.yetto@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

While walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
John Wunderlich wrote...

XS11E <xs11e@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:Xns9C27572405CA3xs11emailinatorcom@xxxxxxxxx:

I don't expect any bugs, I'm gonna give it a shot....


When I first started it up, there was an extra short pause
after which three really old articles that may have been in
my "Sent" folder appeared in my "Outbox" folder. After
transferring them to other folders, Xnews ran without
problem.


If you see this, then it works under Wine as well

....for some strange values of the word "works".

XNews has no knowledge of MIME, and therefore is likely to garble any
posts that contain characters other than simple US-ASCII if the
reader's locale differs from the poster's.

XNews probably still works well for uploading and downloading binaries
in US-ASCII format, but in text newsgroups it's obsolete and annoying.
Other newsreaders have to include code to work around Xnews's
deficiencies - such as slrn's "fallback_charset" variable, which, when
set to "Windows-1252", makes *some* XNews-generated posts readable. But
why should such workarounds be needed?

I wish people would stop using and recommending XNews for text
newsgroups. IMO, even Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird and rn are
better. In fact, even X.EXE is better, since it doesn't *** up other
people's text as comprehensively and persistently as XNews does.

A newsreader that doesn't understand MIME is a *bad* newsreader. XNews
has been left behind and should now be of only historical interest,
unless Luu is willing to demonstrate that he's a good netizen by
adding the kind of MIME support that even the most primitive modern
newsreaders offer.


Apologies for ranting, but the idea that we should celebrate a trivial
change to software that has had annoying, *non*-trivial faults for
many years gets my goat.

And *nobody* is allowed to get my goat except my goat's wife and
wealthy hillbillies!



--
PJR :-)
slrn newsreader v0.9.9p1: http://slrn.sourceforge.net/
extra slrn documentation: http://slrn-doc.sourceforge.net/
newsgroup name validator: http://pjr.lasnobberia.net/usenet/validator
.