This package contains a pre-release of (ding) Gnus, version 0.x. The lisp directory contains the source lisp files, and the texi directory contains an early draft of the Gnus info pages. Gnus is meant to be totally compatible with GNUS. But, alas, it probably isn't, which is one of the reasons for this pre-release. To use (ding) Gnus you first have to unpack the files, which you've obviously done, because you are reading this. You should definitely byte-compile the source files. To do that, you can simply say "gmake" in this directory. (You have to use GNU's make.) Then you have to tell Emacs where Gnus is. You might put something like (setq load-path (cons (expand-file-name "~/dgnus/lisp") load-path)) in your .emacs file, or wherever you keep such things. Note that (ding) Gnus and GNUS can not coexist in a single Emacs. They both use the same function and variable names. If you have been running GNUS in your Emacs, you should probably exit that Emacs and start a new one to fire up Gnus. (ding) Gnus does absolutely not work with Emacs 18, and only shakily with Emacs 19s before 19.26. So you definitely need a newish Emacs. Then you do a `M-x gnus', and everything should... uhm... it should work, but it might not. Set `debug-on-error' to t, and mail me the backtraces, or, better yet, find out why Gnus does something wrong, fix it, and send me the diffs. :-) There are three main things I want your help and input on: 1) Startup. Does eveything go smoothly, and why not? 2) Any errors while you read news normally? 3) Any errors if you do anything abnormal? 4) Features you do not like, or do like, but would like to tweak a bit, and features you would like to see. You do not have to send me typo corrections for the info pages. They are a very rough first draft - I haven't even read through it, although they should document all of Gnus, I think. I think I have implemented most of the deep-going changes that I'm going to. Things that will probably come in the future, but I haven't gotten around to yet is asynchronous posting/pre-fetch of headers and articles, better digest handling, a hierarchal Newsgroup buffer, and a few other things that I can't think of at the moment. Send any comments and all your bug fixes/complaints to `larsi@ifi.uio.no'.