Getting Reacquainted with Gnus

[David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

Hi,

After much futzing around with other approaches, I decided to surrender
to the inevitable truth that Gnus is the one true way (for me).  So I've
decided -- rather than building upon my already massive lack of
understanding of How It Really Works -- to approach Gnus very slowly, at
an oblique angle, with my old .gnus file handy in case The Beast turns
out to be in a bad mood and I need to konk it over the head in a hurry.

My first step was to go to http://gnus.org and look for documentation.
After poking around a while, I discovered that the latest docs there
were apparently posted sometime in 2003.  That reminded me of why I've
been wary of this project.

Then I tried to figure out which release of Gnus I should be using.  It
turned out that http://gnus.org/dist/ had a whole bunch of
cryptically-named gnus versions.  Ngnus and ognus sounded vaguely like
"No Gnus" and "Oort Gnus," names that I had heard often but never really
understood.  There was no indication of which package might be
appropriate for me.

I'm using a self-built snapshot of GNU Emacs that reports itself as
version

   23.0.60.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.12.9) of 2008-05-03 

The gnus that came with my emacs reports itself to be v5.13, so
eventually I tried looking in its `M-x info' and found section 10.2.1:

  ...
     On the 26th of October 2000, Oort Gnus was begun and was released as
  Gnus 5.10 on May 1st 2003 (24 releases).

     On the January 4th 2004, No Gnus was begun.

     If you happen upon a version of Gnus that has a prefixed name -
  "(ding) Gnus", "September Gnus", "Red Gnus", "Quassia Gnus",
  "Pterodactyl Gnus", "Oort Gnus", "No Gnus" - don't panic.  Don't let it
  know that you're frightened.  Back away.  Slowly.  Whatever you do,
  don't run.  Walk away, calmly, until you're out of its reach.  Find a
  proper released version of Gnus and snuggle up to that instead.

This is cute, but confusing.  And note, the latter paragraph doesn't
appear in the old 2003 docs on gnus.org.  Somehow I persevered, but it
wasn't until section 10.2.7 of the *info* that it began to become clear
what these versions meant.  I still don't know what version I should be
using.  I guess the only thing newer than 5.13 would be a development
snapshot?

My point in writing this post is that the environment for someone trying
to get started with the latest, best Gnus is not too friendly.  I would
like to see updated documentation available on gnus.org, and I'd
especially like to see clear guidance there about what to download when
acquiring gnus.  Even sinking the ognus and ngnus packages into a
subdirectory called "alpha" would be a big help.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com