The most versatile newsreader with respect to threading is
tin. It was written by Iain Lea and is loosely modeled
on an older newsreader named tass (written by Rich Skrenta).
It does its threading when the user enters the newsgroup, and it is
pretty fast unless you're getting posts via NNTP.
On a 486DX50, it takes roughly 30 seconds to thread 1,000 articles when
reading directly from disk. It would take more than 5 minutes over NNTP
to reach a loaded news server.[1]
You may improve this time by regularly updating your index file by invoking
tin with the –u option, so that when
you next start tin to read news the threads already exist.
Alternatively, you can invoke tin with the
–U option to read news. When invoked this way,
tin forks a background process to build the index files
while you are reading news.
Usually, tin dumps its threading databases in the user's
home directory below .tin/index. This may be costly
in terms of resources, however, so you should keep a single copy of them in
a central location. This may be achieved by making tin
setuid to news, for
example. tin will then keep all thread databases below
/var/spool/news/.index. For any file access or shell
escape, it will reset its effective uid to the real uid of the user who
invoked it.[2]
The version of tin included in some Linux distributions
is compiled without NNTP support, but most do have it now. When invoked as
rtin or with the –r option,
tin tries to connect to the NNTP server specified in
the file /etc/nntpserver or in the
NNTPSERVER environment variable.
The nntpserver file simply contains the server's name
on a single line.
