Re: Alternatives to Gnus

[Tim X]

Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sep 2, 11:51 am, Tim X <t...@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>> Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>> > On Sep 2, 12:31 am, Tim X <t...@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>> >> Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>> >> > Could the emacs users give me some alternatives ?
>>
>> >> I'm not convinced that there are any huge advantages in having the same
>> >> program to both read/send/manage email and read/send/manage news.
>>
>> > Well a common interface: less key bindings, one config file etc...
>>
>> IMO the common interface is emacs and the common configuration file is
>> .emacs
>>
>> My point re: advantages is that the similarity between news and mail
>> is really only surface deep. How I want to manage the messages, the type
>> of filtering I do, where things are stored etc are quite different. I've
>> found it rare that one program does both well - you tend to either have
>> news being forced into a mail type paradigm or mail being forced into a
>> news type one.
>
> Actually I've never found weird to have mail being handled like news,
> and that's not what forced me to leave gnus.
>
>> > Why are you using both of them ?
>>
>> Because I am on the VM development team. Sometimes, while fixing bugs or
>> adding features, my copy of VM may not be stable, but I need to maintain
>> a stable environment.
>
> Does that mean that there's no VM stable release out there ? ;)
>

No. VM has been around for nearly 20 years. The VM development team work
hard to ensure stability in released versions. As with all software, the
current head of the development tree is not guaranteed to be as stable
as the last released version, though in reality, like the development
version of emacs itself, it tends to be very stable. In 15 years of use,
I have had two occasions when VM has currupted my mail file. Both of
these were due to changes in emacs itself that either caused bugs in VM
or revealed a bug that was revealed by changes in emacs. This is normal
and is why we only attempt to maintain compatibility with the last few
versions of emacs (currently emacs 21 or later and XEmacs 21.2 or
later). Of course, if you are someone who is working on enhancements and
bug fixes, then the version you are modifying can become unstable, but
as we don't check changes into version control until we have at least
some confidence the changes are reasonably stable, non-developers don't
see this instability.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au