Subject: Re: bug#61325: 30.0.50; Jokes in GNUS manual

From: Ihor Radchenko <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2023 11:14:19 +0000

Richard Stallman <[email-masked]> writes:

> That may be a key to making progress.  If some readers can't understand
> the technical information, that is indisputably a problem.  The question
> is how to fix it.
>
> Can you show is concretel what technical information is hard to understand
> for those who don't get the joke?  I have never used GNUS.

The paragraph in question is

    8 Scoring
    
    Other people use “kill files”, but we here at Gnus Towers like scoring
    better than killing, so we’d rather switch than fight.  They do
    something completely different as well, so sit up straight and pay
    attention!

The technical information is that unlike the concept of
"killing" [*] that may be familiar to Usenet software users, Gnus
introduces the idea of "scoring" [**]. Scoring is a more powerful (and
also faster [***] compared to killing. Gnus recommends using scoring
over killing.

I had to read forward, backward, and specifically search for keywords to
understand the above.

[*] "killing" in Gnus is, AFAIU, hiding (not deleting) threads that
    match some criteria.
[**] First mentioned in 3.7 Group Score, but actually more general (does
     not only apply to Groups). Score is a number assigned to Gnus
    threads according to a number of criteria - each criteria (like
    matching some words in subject/body) will increase/decrease the
    total score. Gnus can then sort threads according to their score and
    even hide threads with score below certain threshold.

[***] 8.13 Kill Files
         In short, kill processing is a lot slower (and I do mean _a
      lot_) than score processing, so it might be a good idea to rewrite
      your kill files into score files.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
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