Re: Replacement for/addition to yarn?

From: rex (rex@ptw.com)
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998 22:34:10 -0800

Howard Schwartz <theo@ncal.verio.com> wrote:
>
>Indeed, since Chin will neither revise Yarn further, nor release the
>source code - Yarn has been dead in the water, independent of OS, for
>some time now.
>
>In light of the previous I offer a new tool I happened on by accident,
>when writing the author of an old mail reading tool:
>
>ftp://ftp.let.uu.nl/pub/users/jeroen/readmail/rm50b76.zip
>
>is a URL or ftp site that will fetch you an offline message reader that
>is almost a complete replacement for yarn (?!). It unique feature is that
>it reads just about every news, mail, bbs, instant message format you can
>think of. It comes with predefined formats for reading yarn folders and
>an old version of the yarn data files. If the thing does not know how to
>read your file or message format, you can define new formats in a fairly
>easy dialogue screen.

Wow! What a time warp! I used Readmail long before I knew Yarn existed. I
wrote TSRs to enhance its functionality, and put together a package
to give to correspondents so they could read mail offline. Then I
discovered Yarn -- an early version. Yarn fit my needs better, and
Jeroen had disappeared. Later, I located him again and tried an
early 5.x version. It was pretty buggy, and I didn't do much with it.

Thanks much for the detailed update. Readmail certainly has some unique
features.

However, it doesn't solve the Linux problem. The Linux community needs
a Yarn (or Readmail) type reader with free source code. Given the
huge number of free source programs available for Linux, it's
strange that no one has written a Yarn clone. It's a basic tool. Why
doesn't one exist? There is Plor, but I don't know how promising it is.

-rex