Re: Gnus email. -For dummies type information.

[Kester Clegg <kester@RemoveThisBit.cs.york.ac.uk>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
> 
> > But providing a sample .gnus is perhaps a good idea altough quite
> > un-emacsishy in style.
> 
> Yes, I now found another reason against a sample file: people who do
> simple customizations can just do M-x customize RET.
> 

But won't this write to your .emacs file?  I don't have a .gnus file, so
a sample could easily be provided where everything is commented to
explain how the example configuration would work but is commented out by
default.  I seem to distantly remember Xemacs providing this menu option
for a sample .emacs file, maybe something similar could be done for
.gnus?

I actually think the areas where people really need help are the more
complex areas, like filtering, archiving, posting styles, scoring,
etc. and it's in these areas people would benefit from seeing example
configuration code.

The argument that people should understand what they have in their
.emacs is a bit weak, given that customising emacs / gnus is so
fraught with complexity.  It's very easy to mess up your .emacs and to
put conflicting things in there.  Because it's complex, people need help
and a well laid out sample configuration would do that.

Just imagine if samba users had to start coding the smb.conf from
scratch tomorrow?  There'd be uproar, but that is exactly what we
currently have with emacs / gnus today.


-- 
************************************************************************
Kester Clegg				Dept. of Computer Science,
Research Assistant (UTC)		University of York, 
Tel (01904) 43 27 49			email: kester at cs.york.ac.uk
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