If you have a directory that has lots of articles in separate files in it, you might treat it as a newsgroup. The files have to have numerical names, of course.
This might be an opportune moment to mention ange-ftp
(and its
successor efs
), that most wonderful of all wonderful Emacs
packages. When I wrote nndir
, I didn't think much about it---a
backend to read directories. Big deal.
ange-ftp
changes that picture dramatically. For instance, if you
enter the ange-ftp
file name
`/ftp.hpc.uh.edu:/pub/emacs/ding-list/
' as the directory name,
ange-ftp
or efs
will actually allow you to read this
directory over at `sina
' as a newsgroup. Distributed news ahoy!
nndir
will use NOV files if they are present.
nndir
is a ``read-only'' backend---you can't delete or expire
articles with this method. You can use nnmh
or nnml
for
whatever you use nndir
for, so you could switch to any of those
methods if you feel the need to have a non-read-only nndir
.