Re: Fwd: status of slrn

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 09:40:28AM +0800, John E. Davis wrote:
> [This message was posted several days ago to news.software.readers.  I
>  was asked to forward it to the slrn-users mailing list.]
> 
> Hello,
> 
> As some of you already know, a number of years ago I asked Thomas
> Schultz if he would like to take over as lead developer of slrn.  I
> chose Thomas for this role because it was clear from the patches that
> he sent me that he had a good understanding of the internals of slrn.
> I think that most would agree that he was a good choice and that he
> has done a great job in this role, and as such deserves a big
> "Thank-You" from all slrn users.
> 
> As Thomas no longer has time for the development of slrn, a couple of
> weeks ago he asked me if I would like to again assume the
> responsibility of slrn's lead developer. Although, with the exception
> of the slang-2 patches, I had not worked with slrn source code for a
> number of years, I accepted his offer.  I did so for a couple of
> reasons.
> 
> First of all, I use slrn on a daily basis to keep up with a number of
> mailing-lists.  But, as you can see from my previous postings, that
> version of slrn is 0.9.6.4, which dates from about 2000, and requires
> slang-1.  A slang-2-based slrn would mean that I would no longer have
> to drag slang-1 around.  I did not consider upgrading to a new version
> of slrn as an option since a slang-2 version was never released.  By
> becoming an active developer, I would be forced to upgrade.
> 
> I am also the primary developer of the jed text editor, which has a
> lot in common with slrn, e.g., it also makes extensive use of slang
> (more than slrn, in fact).  More to the point, I want to provide jed
> with better support for multiple character-set encodings using, e.g.,
> iconv.  It is my hope that the experience I gain from working with the
> character-set code in slrn will simplify the job of adding such
> support to jed.
> 
> I have been working with the latest development version of the slrn
> source code for the past two weekends.  In fact, if you look at the
> headers of this post, you will see that I am using slrn "pre-0.9.9".
> As the version suggests, the next official release will be 0.9.9.  It
> is unclear at this point exactly what will be in that version.
> 
> Right now I am re-acquainting myself with the slrn source code by
> cleaning up and simplifying various parts of the code, and fixing any
> (potential) bugs that I see.  I have also removed the dependence on
> automake.  I would like to support other operating systems such as
> windows via the mingw32 compiler, and I find it simpler to do so by not
> having automake in the way.  
> 
> I plan to pull much of the mime and character-set code out of slrn and
> rewrite it in slang.  As it is far easier to deal with strings in the
> interpreter than it is in C, I believe that this will make the code
> more robust, and much, much simpler to maintain.  The idea is that when
> slrn starts up, it will read some file, e.g., /usr/lib/slrn/slrn.sl,
> that will register various hooks so that when slrn needs to mime
> encode/decode something, it will call the appropriate hook to perform
> this task.
> 
> Perhaps later today or next weekend, I will check my changes into the
> slrn source code repository (svn, not cvs) for others to look at and
> try out.  If so, I will make an announcement here.
> 
> Feel free to make other suggestions about what you would like to see
> in the next release.  Also please let me know of any problems that you
> are experiencing with the currently available versions of slrn.  For
> example, if slrn cannot properly cope with an article, let me know
> what the problem is as well as its Message-ID.  Of course patches are
> always welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> --John

This is excellent news indeed. Some years ago I used slrn on a regular
basis as I had a unix machine at work. Since retiring, for a number of
reasons, I keep a linux box off the net and use a Windows machine with
cygwin to access the net. I have therefore found slrn too difficult to
get going and have been disappointed with using tin or the mutt nntp
patch. However, John's post encouraged me to get slrn up and going. I
got the slang binary and then compiled slrn. No problems. I am happy
again and can read usenet in a sensible way.

However, when is slrn going to be fully integrated into cygwin and
available from the cygwin site?

Can I help with this?

Brian.

P.S. See below. I even found my old sig for use only with the slrn
list!!

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-- 
      Brian Salter-Duke          Melbourne, Australia
     My real address is b_duke(AT)bigpond(DOT)net(DOT)au
               Use this for reply or followup
Use slrn for all your news reading - "http://slrn.sourceforge.net/" 




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