From: steve ross <cwdinfo@...>
Date: 2010-04-18T05:47:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading Ruby-Talk in Atom or RSS

On Apr 17, 2010, at 6:17 AM, Jörg W Mittag wrote:
> 
> steve ross wrote:
>> The recent "moderation" thread raised several questions in my mind. I'm interested in what others are doing about this:
>> 
>> 1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
>> 2. Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it's email and either on or off.
>> 3. Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?
>> 
>> Sorry for all the questions, but the "moderation" thread raised an
>> important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader
>                                                       ^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
>> may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.
> 
> Man, am I really *that* old? To me, "news reader" means "Usenet 
> client", not "feed reader".

Right you are. My terminology stands corrected. The problem with Usenet
-- actually, the problem with the lists I read -- is that many, if not
most are not mirrored on Usenet. For e.g., I can't find any of the Google
Groups like rSpec, Rails, Haml, etc. mirrored on Usenet.

> Which, incidentally, is how *I* read ruby-talk, ehm sorry, I meant it 
> is how I read *comp.lang.ruby*. And it works like a charm, mainly 
> because, unlike e-mail, RSS and Atom, Usenet was *specifically 
> designed* for discussion.
> 
> Threading works perfectly, because proper threading support is 
> actually a required part of the standard since day 1. Unlike e-mail, 
> where threading only works if both the sender and the recipient 
> implement it properly (and it is *not* a required part of the 
> standard, so there *are* actually mail clients which *don't* do it 
> properly, including this thing called GMail that you might have heard 
> of).

I will grant you that threading works infinitely better in a Usenet
reader. But, again, many of the lists I read are syndicated via RSS
or Atom and not mirrored to Usenet :(

> [Actually, to be fair, there are sometimes threading problems. But 
> they don't happen in the Usenet. They only happen when someone uses a 
> broken e-mail program to post to ruby-talk and then the 
> ruby-talk-to-comp.lang.ruby gateway can't figure out which thread the 
> mail belongs to.]
> 
> It's basically an instance of "use the right tool for the job". E-mail 
> is for 1-1 communication, Atom is for 1-many, Usenet is for many-many. 
> Ruby-talk is many-many, ergo Usenet is the only sane choice.
> 
> Anyway, this doesn't really answer your question, but it is a viable 
> alternate solution. It's pretty simple, really: all Usenet clients 
> have awesome threading support, because a) the standard requires it 
> and b) they would be useless otherwise. (There are newsgroups which 
> get literally several orders of magnitude more traffic than 
> comp.lang.ruby, Usenet clients simply *have* to have good support for 
> threading and filtering.)

If I'm just missing some Usenet groups, I'm sure happier with that as
a solution, but my impression is that as long as people are putting stuff
on Google Groups, the mirroring to Usenet will be limited. Yes?

> That was my 2c.
> 
> jwm

And a good $.02 it was!