Introduction to slrn
slrn is the creation of John E. Davis (JED) and was first made available in 1994. It was written partly because of JED's dissatisfaction with the relatively sluggish performance of gnus/emacs as well as a general dissatisfaction with other newsreaders such as tin, nn, rn and others. JED also wanted to write software that would utilise his new screen management routines for the slang library and finally wanted to write a newsreader for his girlfriend to use on a VMS platform. From these various threads slrn was created. But what is slrn?
slrn ('s-lang read news') is a newsreader, i.e. a program that accesses a newsserver to read messages from the Internet News service (also known as 'Usenet'). It runs in console mode on various Unix-like systems (including Linux), 32-bit Windows, OS/2, BeOS and VMS. Beside the usual features of a newsreader slrn supports scoring rules to highlight, sort or kill articles based on information from their header. It is highly customizable, allows free key-bindings and can easily be extended using the sophisticated s-lang macro language. Offline reading is possible by using either slrnpull (shipped with slrn) or a local newsserver (like leafnode or INN).
From slrn Version 0.9.7.0 the program was developed by Thomas Schultz with the help of a great number of people who made contributions. John E. Davis has returned to develop slrn again with Version pre0.9.9 and the slrn community both thank Thomas for his hard work and welcome John back.
Information on slrn
This web page aims to be the central access point for web based information on slrn but there are several other places to gain information about slrn. There are several newsgroups where slrn is discussed:
- news.software.readers: This newsgroup deals with all kinds of newsreaders, so please put "[slrn]" somewhere in the Subject header line to make your posting easy to find for other slrn users. The newsgroup is read by the slrn community and JED.
- alt.lang.s-lang: This newsgroup deals with the s-lang macro language that can be used to extend and customize slrn.
- de.comm.software.newsreader: This newsgroup corresponds to news.software.readers, but is intended for discussions in German language.
There are also two public mailing lists for slrn:
- slrn announce: The slrn-announce mailing list is used to inform slrn's users of new releases, important bugfixes or major changes of the website. These announcements are also posted to slrn-user, so there is no need to subscribe to both lists.
- slrn-user: The slrn-user mailing list is open for discussion of the use, development and extension of the slrn newsreader. slrn-related announcements are also forwarded to this list, so there is no need to subscribe both slrn-admin and slrn-user. For questions about slrn that might be of broad interest, please use the appropriate newsgroup (which is in most cases news.software.readers).
Information About this Website
Work began on the slrn web site in 2000 when Sven Guckes, Felix Schüller, Thomas Schultz and Matthias Friedrich jointly worked on a site that eventually featured the first slrn manual, a set of macros produced by Thomas Shultz, Felix Schüller's "cleanscore" script and an slrn image gallery. A spirit of great enthusiasm for slrn and the new website can be seen at this time which culminated in 2001 with Thomas Schultz taking over development of slrn from John E. Davis and thus as of version 0.9.7.0 the slrn SourceForge website became the official website of slrn. Work continued on both the website and slrn until the final release by Thomas Schultz of slrn 0.9.8.1 in October of 2004.
In October 14th 2007 John E. Davis announced his return as developer for slrn and the release of slrn pre0.9.9. In the ensuing months it became clear that the current slrn SourceForge website no longer accurately reflected the current status of slrn and Andrew Strong, an slrn enthusiast, volunteered to rewrite the site in a new format with updated information. This site was released on July 2nd 2008 and it is hoped that with further development the slrn SourceForge website will once again assume the central position that it held in the slrn community from 2000 to 2004.
Some Acknowledgements
The new website owes an obvious debt to those who built the previous slrn website: Sven Guckes, Thomas Schultz, Felix Schüller and Matthias Friedrich. However a great deal of assistance was also given by regulars of the newsgroups news.software.readers, regulars of the slrn-users mailing list and of course by the developer of slrn John E. Davis. The current website maintainer acknowledges the debt to all of these generous people.
