Appendices
Terminology
GNUS was written by Masanobu UMEDA. When autumn crept up in '94, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen grew bored and decided to rewrite Gnus.
If you want to investigate the person responsible for this outrage, you
can point your (feh!) web browser to
`http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~larsi/'. This is also the primary
distribution point for the new and spiffy versions of Gnus, and is known
as The Site That Destroys Newsrcs And Drives People Mad.
During the first extended alpha period of development, the new Gnus was called ``(ding) Gnus''. (ding) is, of course, short for ding is not Gnus, which is a total and utter lie, but who cares? (Besides, the ``Gnus'' in this abbreviation should probably be pronounced ``news'' as UMEDA intended, which makes it a more appropriate name, don't you think?)
In any case, after spending all that energy on coming up with a new and spunky name, we decided that the name was too spunky, so we renamed it back again to ``Gnus''. But in mixed case. ``Gnus'' vs. ``GNUS''. New vs. old.
The first ``proper'' release of Gnus 5 was done in November 1995 when it was included in the Emacs 19.30 distribution (132 (ding) Gnus releases plus 15 Gnus 5.0 releases).
In May 1996 the next Gnus generation (aka. ``September Gnus'' (after 99 releases)) was released under the name ``Gnus 5.2'' (40 releases).
On July 28th 1996 work on Red Gnus was begun, and it was released on January 25th 1997 (after 84 releases) as ``Gnus 5.4'' (67 releases).
On September 13th 1997, Quassia Gnus was started and lasted 37 releases. If was released as ``Gnus 5.6 on March 8th 1998.
If you happen upon a version of Gnus that has a prefixed name -- ``(ding) Gnus'', ``September Gnus'', ``Red Gnus'', ``Quassia Gnus'' -- don't panic. Don't let it know that you're frightened. Back away. Slowly. Whatever you do, don't run. Walk away, calmly, until you're out of its reach. Find a proper released version of Gnus and snuggle up to that instead.
Appendices
Terminology