README

* Content

This package contains a development version of Gnus.  The lisp directory
contains the source lisp files, and the texi directory contains the Gnus info
pages.

* Emacsen

No Gnus does absolutely not work with anything older than Emacs 21 or
XEmacs 21.4.

Users of the Emacs development version (Emacs 23) are strongly encouraged to
also use the version bundled with Emacs.

* Setup

To use 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 "./configure && make" in this directory.

Do not say "make install".  I repeat, do *NOT* say "make install".  If
you say "make install" and then complain about things not working,
I'll be very annoyed.  If you say "make install" and things happen to
work, that's all fine and dandy for you, but it's quite likely that it
won't.

If you are using XEmacs, you *must* say "./configure && make EMACS=xemacs".

Then you have to tell Emacs where Gnus is.  You might put something
like

   (setq load-path (cons (expand-file-name "~/ngnus-0.11/lisp") load-path))
   (require 'gnus-load)

in your .emacs file, or wherever you keep such things.  

To enable reading the Gnus manual, you could say something like:

  (require 'info)
  (if (featurep 'xemacs)
      (add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "~/ngnus-0.11/texi/")
    (add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "~/ngnus-0.11/texi/"))

To compile the Gnus manual, you either need a pretty new Emacs, or a
pretty new version of the texinfo tools.

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 four main things I want your help and input on:

1) Startup.  Does everything 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.

Send any comments and all your bug fixes/complaints to
`bugs@gnus.org'.


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