gnus: Why?

 
 11.2.2 Why?
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 What’s the point of Gnus?
 
    I want to provide a “rad”, “happening”, “way cool” and “hep”
 newsreader, that lets you do anything you can think of.  That was my
 original motivation, but while working on Gnus, it has become clear to
 me that this generation of newsreaders really belong in the stone age.
 Newsreaders haven’t developed much since the infancy of the net.  If the
 volume continues to rise with the current rate of increase, all current
 newsreaders will be pretty much useless.  How do you deal with
 newsgroups that have thousands of new articles each day?  How do you
 keep track of millions of people who post?
 
    Gnus offers no real solutions to these questions, but I would very
 much like to see Gnus being used as a testing ground for new methods of
 reading and fetching news.  Expanding on UMEDA-san’s wise decision to
 separate the newsreader from the back ends, Gnus now offers a simple
 interface for anybody who wants to write new back ends for fetching mail
 and news from different sources.  I have added hooks for customizations
 everywhere I could imagine it being useful.  By doing so, I’m inviting
 every one of you to explore and invent.
 
    May Gnus never be complete.  ‘C-u 100 M-x all-hail-emacs’ and ‘C-u
 100 M-x all-hail-xemacs’.