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(gnus)Why?


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Why?
----

   What's the point of Gnus?

   I want to provide a "rad", "happening", "way cool" and "hep"
newsreader, that lets you do anything you can think of.  That was my
original motivation, but while working on Gnus, it has become clear to
me that this generation of newsreaders really belong in the stone age.
Newsreaders haven't developed much since the infancy of the net.  If the
volume continues to rise with the current rate of increase, all current
newsreaders will be pretty much useless.  How do you deal with
newsgroups that have thousands of new articles each day?  How do you
keep track of millions of people who post?

   Gnus offers no real solutions to these questions, but I would very
much like to see Gnus being used as a testing ground for new methods of
reading and fetching news.  Expanding on UMEDA-san's wise decision to
separate the newsreader from the back ends, Gnus now offers a simple
interface for anybody who wants to write new back ends for fetching mail
and news from different sources.  I have added hooks for customizations
everywhere I could imagine it being useful.  By doing so, I'm inviting
every one of you to explore and invent.

   May Gnus never be complete.  `C-u 100 M-x all-hail-emacs' and `C-u
100 M-x all-hail-xemacs'.


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