Re: Gnus v5.4.62 is released

[Jens Lautenbacher <jens@metrix.de>]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

> Jens Lautenbacher <jens@metrix.de> writes:
> 
> > Hmm, I may have missed the beginning of the thread, but I assume you
> > talk about gnus-read-active-file 'some and gnus-check-new-newsgroups
> > 'ask-server; then I see no possibility to keep track of killed
> > groups (and easiely list them) without having the list of killed
> > groups saved.
> 
> You are right.  What I meant is: if changes are being made, let's try
> to make Gnus behave logically.
> 
> Logical behaviour includes not creating a 100K or so .newsrc.eld by
> default.
> 

I beg to differ. from the beginners point it's still a bit difficult
to set up a gnus environment. Looking at other news readers
(blasphemy, I know) I can simply list all the groups and enter
them. All these subtle differences between subscribed
/unsbscribed/killed and so on are very nice once I have set up my whole
environment. But it's extremely non-logical if suddenly I can't access
the whole feed anymore without explicitely reloading the active file
-- and even at a fast scientific internet access with a fast computer
it still takes damned long to load the whole active file from the
server.

Besides that a newbie will not know what to do, and will switch to tin
after 5 minutes without getting what he wants (yeah yeah, RTFM, I
know. _I_ do, but we all know our users). The thousands of different
listing/loading/browsing commands don't help either, as they are layed 
out in a totally flat way: there is no "hirarchy" build of them with
"general" commands which do the right thing most of the time and
"expert" commands, unfortunately. Even the menu doesn't suggest such a 
hirarchy. 

Conclusion: Follow the principle of least surprise, and that mean:
Selecting "List killed groups" selects the killed groups. Point. Don't 
assume all a user understand the difference between C-u A k and A k;
and hey why is there a own list active A A.... has a C-u A A a
different effect.....

all of course just IMHO

    jtl