News Peruser Overview

News Peruser is an X11-based offline newsreader for Linux, featuring
header retrieval, and regular expression filtering. If you don't know
what an offline newsreader is, read on, otherwise there is no need to
read this file. Proceed to the INSTALL file for installation
instructions.

Offline newsreaders are rare beasts in the Unix world, but common
among single-user operating systems. A traditional Unix news client
accesses a centralized news spool through server software, making data
requests to the server in response to a user's commands, as the user
makes them. A problem with this scenario for many users who pay for
dial-up access to the network where their news servers live, is the
considerable time they must maintain their network connections while
they use their news clients. They may wish to minimize the time they
spend connected to the network for various reasons. They may pay for
their network usage at an hourly-rate, or they may pay a flat fee for
a set number of hours of access per month, or they may live in a
location where there is no flat-rate local telephone service, or they
may wish to have their telephone lines available for other use. The
solution to this problem is to maintain a news spool on the local
machine, only periodically connecting to the network to exchange
articles. Then, the user may browse the spool, and compose articles
while disconnected from the network. This solution requires additional
software to maintain the local spool, and possibly locally-running
server software to serve up articles to the client.

News Peruser implements an alternative solution in one complete
package. It does not maintain a central Unix-style local news spool
that traditional news clients can access, but rather keeps separate
private databases for each user, and so is best suited to the scale of
small systems. To keep connect times to a minimum, Peruser has been
designed around the concept of header retrieval. Peruser can quickly
retrieve only article headers from a server, allowing the user to
disconnect and browse the headers offline. When the user reconnects to
the network, the full text of only those articles that interested the
user can be transferred to the local machine. The user can once again
disconnect and browse and compose out-going messages while
disconnected, perhaps reconnecting a final time to post out-going
messages.

See the file INSTALL for installation instructions. Peruser is
self-documenting (hopefully). 

James Bailie
http://www.wwdc.com/~jbailie
