Improved struct module

[François Pinard]

wtanksle at hawking.armored.net (William Tanksley) écrit:

> >> I must admit that I am also one of those lazy bastards that uses his
> >> newsreader's "find any messages by Tim Peters"-function to locate
> >> interesting threads.

> >So do I, but even more lazily!  Gnus bolds Tim's messages automatically
> >for me, when preparing the threaded summary for the Python mailgroup. :-)

> Ah, but does your newsreader automatically delete all the other messages?
> Hah!  Some time-saver it is.

You forgot the smileys (or <winkles>)!  No, surely not.  There are a lot
of interesting contributions, opinions and attitudes.  I try to at least
throw a quick eye on everything.  But it's not easy: after I re-established
a mail gateway machine around here, which has been down for around five
days, I got a flurry of maybe 6000 messages, and my Python mailgroup only
got over 1000 for a while.  Now back below 100, but some messages are very
difficult to get rid of, as they are so informational that I hardly want
to even file them away for later study...  You are too interesting, guys!

> I used to use nn (NoNews).  Now THAT was a good newsreader -- or news
> ignorer as the case may be.  [...]

For users, this is cake, and always have been so far that I know.  On the
other hand, (and I do not know where `nn' stands nowadays), I do remember
that many years ago, for a system administrator, `nn' was sometimes turning
into pure frantic nightmare.  When things were starting to go wrong,
rebuilding indices and everything was taking _days_ of machine time
(machines were also much slower than in these days.)  Many years ago,
I've been hired by a group that gave me the mandate of finding a way to
gracefully untangle `nn' from their system, while keeping their users happy.
It was a difficult undertaking for the poor little me! :-)

> In most newsreaders the default is to read every message; in NN the
> default is to ignore every message.

I'm not going to give in a newsreader war, and I guess that best ideas just
flood into all newreaders after a while.  Gnus is immensely configurable,
and I'm confident that users could do almost whatever we want with it.
I use it to read my mail, search databases, and a few other things.  Even,
sometimes, not often, to read news :-).  On the user side, I would easily
bet that `nn' is faster, but on reasonable machines, Gnus is very workable.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard