Re: Yarn and GUI news/mail

From: sthoenna@efn.org
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 22:31:17 -0700

In article <JDHi10E6A1ab092yn@momeraths.org>,
MarchHare@momeraths.org (Sysop John) wrote:
[snipped]
>you press "s" for save, it saves it into the news directory. If you
>press "o" to save to a folder, though, it puts it all into the mail
>directory. Not consistent, IMO.

Why should you expect saved text files and folders to default to the same
directory? Yarn is just following the unix standard where just about any
newsreader saves text files to the ~/news directory and where just about
any mail program uses mail folders in the ~/mail (or ~/Mail) directory.

This makes perfect sense. All mail folders (and *only* mail folders) go in
the ~/mail directory. All cooperating mail readers (only) look for them there.
Similarly, most newsreaders use ~/news as the default place to put messages
saved to files. They assume you don't want to clutter up your home directory
and a subdir named "news" just plain makes sense. Unlike saving to folders
you are perfectly free to specify a full path (e.g. \savdmsgs\ltr.txt) since
there is no particular reason to restrict you to ~/news.

Its all a matter of perspective. Just remember that yarn is, at heart, a
transplanted unix program with a philosophy of many competing tools sharing
the same data rather than a more configurable PC program with a unique and
undocumented way of storing stuff.