>Do the traditional unix programs allow offline reading of news and
>mail from SOUP packets? If not, that's the reason for a Linux port of
>Yarn.
Traditionally, under Unix, mail and news transport and
storage get performed by different programs to the ones
you use to read the mail and news. With the programs
communicating via common protocols.
i.e for a non-full time net connection something like:
News: Suck (transport) + INN (storage) + slrn (reading)
Mail: Fetchmail (transport) + Sendmail (delivery) +
mutt (reading)
'Offline reading' thus gets regarded as something of an
abomination (purists further complain that we should
all use UUCP rather than sucking transports, maybe
even that the non-availability of consumer UUCP feeds
_causes_ all this "offline nonsense"). Each box runs
its own mail and news daemons, or accesses across a
full-time connection something that performs these tasks
for it.
In my Linux setup, Suck + INN, are replaced by the
Leafnode suite (because INN's hairiness *scares* me),
and I have sendmail handing off to procmail for final
delivery so I get mail filtering.
The same idea, but with different names in various
positions.
I tend to use gnus and rmail (both under Emacs) to do
the actual reading (gnus can do pseudo newsgroups based
on recieved mail -- and I think it can create and
read Soup packets though I don't use them on Linux).
I find the hairy bit setting it all up to work how
I like. But once I've got it going it works very
well, for me.
In my opinion, any mooted port of the Yarn user interface,
to provide an integrated mail and news client to Unix,
shouldn't replicate the storage and delivery portions of
the system, instead sticking to reading. It would in other
words, need to speak nntp to your locally running nntp
daemon, and handle the usual Unix mailbox files.
For SOUP packets you would need a program that processes
a packet and injects appropriately into your your locally
running mail and news daemons, and one that does the
reverse, rather than completely replacing the usual system.
Since I just use souper to suck down mail and news,
I don't need such a thing myself, as other programs
can do equivalent things without the Soup packet
stage. This would be different if you were using
UQWK to pack on your shell account.
Just my useless two cents, since given my lack of skill
and motivation, I'm certainly not going to be at the
forefront of any effort at writing such things... (-;
-- Kapusniak, Stefan m