What is XRN?
XRN is a Usenet News reader for the X window system.
XRN strives to adhere to all relevant standards and to help users
avoid the common pitfalls of participation in the Usenet. To that
end, all releases of XRN starting with 9.02 are compliant with the
Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval (GNKSA), a standard which defines
how News readers should behave to make the Usenet a better place for
everyone. See for more
information about the GNKSA. XRN's GNKSA review can be viewed at
.
XRN is maintained by Jonathan Kamens. Bug reports or comments about
it should be sent to bug-xrn@kamens.brookline.ma.us.
XRN knows how to do threading, but it doesn't do MIME, e.g., it
properly display postings that are formatted in HTML and it doesn't
know how to reassemble multipart postings. If you need these
features, you should use another News reader, e.g., Mozilla
Thunderbird.
Heck, you should probably just go ahead and use Mozilla Thunderbird in
any case. XRN is creaky old software that hardly anybody uses
anymore. Why are you bothering with it?
Seriously, XRN does have some advantages over other News readers
available nowadays. These include:
* It's fast.
* It uses much, much less memory. It was written back in the day when
people actually cared about how much memory their applications used.
* You can do a lot with the keyboard -- virtually all buttons in XRN
are bound to keyboard shortcuts.
* It has relatively powerful KILL-file functionality (although there
are probably News readers out there which can do better).
* It's rock solid. It hardly ever crashes, and when it does, it's
usually because the server did something really obnoxious.
XRN's biggest disadvantage is that very few people use it, I'm hardly
supporting it, and I'm not really doing any new development for it.
If you're looking for a supported, evolving News reader with an active
user community, you should probably look elsewhere.
Where to get XRN
The XRN home page is .
XRN's Github repository is .
Source code tarballs for XRN can be found at .
Compiling and installing XRN
As of XRN 10.00, the old "Imake" method of building X applications is
no longer supported. The old Imakefile is still in the source
tarball, and if you're lucky you might be able to get it to work, but
for the most part, you'll want to use a recent version of X that
supports the new X application build system based on GNU autoconf.
There's an RPM spec file in the tarball, which means that if you're
lucky, you can download the source code and run "rpmbuild -tb
xrn-.tar.gz", and it will "just work." Of course, this
assume that you have "rpmbuild" installed on your system. You may
also need to install some "devel" packages that XRN needs; if so, then
rpmbuild will tell you what to install.
If you're not on an RPM-based system, then you should be able to
download the source tarball, unpack it, run "./configure" in the
source directory, run "make", and finally run "make install" as root.
If you have no idea whatsoever what the last two paragraphs mean, then
you probably shouldn't be using XRN. As I mentioned above, I'm hardly
supporting XRN nowadays, so the only people I expect to be using it
are people who can pretty much figure out how to compile it for
themselves. If you have trouble compiling it, feel free to send me
email, but you may get back the response, "Sorry, but I can't help."
The only UNIX system I work on nowadays in Linux, and therefore the
only UNIX system on which building XRN has been tested in quite a
while is Linux. If you're trying to build it on some other kind of
UNIX, you're using a recent version of X with that uses autoconf
support, and it's not working for you, then I'd like to hear from you.
If you're trying to make Imake work, you're pretty much on your own.
However, note that you'll have to edit config.h before you run xmkmf.
If you have problems...
If you have problems compiling or running XRN, you should check the
COMMON-PROBLMS file in the XRN distribution to see if your problem is
documented there. If not, write to bug-xrn@kamens.brookline.ma.us for
assistance.
The XRN mailing list
If you would like to be informed of new releases of XRN and of any
major bugs that are discovered in between releases, you can subscribe
to the xrn-users@kamens.brookline.ma.us mailing list. It's an
announcement list, not a discussion list, so the traffic on it is very
low. Send mail to xrn-users-request@kamens.brookline.ma.us to ask to
be added to the list.
The future of XRN
Release 10.00 of XRN is the first general-availability release in
almost ten years. The next major release may take just as long, or
even longer. I have very little time to work on XRN.
However, I do not want XRN to be orphaned or to deteriorate.
Therefore, I will continue to make bug-fix releases as necessary, and
I will devote as much time as I can to making enhancements.
If you are interested in volunteering to take over, I'd love to hear
from you, but I'm only going to hand off XRN to someone whom I'm
convinced will do a good job, because I've invested a lot of effort
into it, and because the folks who maintained it before me allowed it
to stagnate for years; I do not want that to happen again.
Interesting files in the XRN distribution
There are a number of files in the XRN distribution besides the actual
source files for the program. I maintain some of these files
actively. Others are left over from before I started maintaining XRN,
and I have not reviewed them for correctness or updated them; use the
information in them at your own risk. In the following list,
asterisks indicate files which I have tried to keep up-to-date (this
more files may be updated in future releases, especially if people
send me feedback about the out-of-date ones):
COMMON-PROBLMS A list of common problems and questions about
the program, with explanations and solutions.
COPYRIGHT Describes the copyright restrictions on XRN.
I have left the University of California
copyright intact, despite the fact that it's
not clear at this point how much of the code
was actually written by UC employees, because
that's the easiest thing to do and it doesn't
do any harm.
* README This file.
* README.* Notes about compiling XRN in specific
environments. For example, README.Linux
contains notes about compiling XRN on Linux
systems.
* TODO A list of pending bug fixes and improvements
to XRN. If you're interested in helping to
develop XRN, picking one of the items in this
list and digging around in the source code to
see what you can do about it is a good way to
start.
This file is sort of "half up-to-date,"
because I've been adding new items to the
beginning of it, but the items at the end of
it are left over from before I took over
maintenance of XRN, and some of them may be
inaccurate.
contrib/* Various scripts, hints, etc. contributed by
XRN users and not "officially" part of XRN.
* doc/rfc977.txt The Internet RFC governing NNTP, the Network
News Transport Protocol, which XRN users to
talk to the server.
* doc/strtok.doc Documentation of the strtok() implementation
included with XRN.
* doc/vprintf.doc Documentation for the vprintf() implementation
included with XRN.
* doc/vprintf.port The original vprintf() implementation from
which the one used in XRN is derived.
still-to-do/* Various bug fixes that have not yet been
examined or incorporated into the program.
Some of these are probably obsolete. I
inherited them when I took over maintenance
of the program, and I haven't done anything
with them.
I hope you find XRN useful!
Jonathan Kamens
jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us