German article about newsbeuter

Since about a month ago, you can find a nice introductory article about newsbeuter on the German Ubuntuusers Wiki. If you’re new to newsbeuter, this article gives a good overview, as it explains the most important things to know on a few pages in a clearly arranged fashion.

Newsbeuter 0.9 released

Newsbeuter 0.9 has just been released. Here’s the changelog for this latest release:

Improved locking to allow multiple newsbeuter instances (one instance per cache file)
Flagged articles don't get deleted anymore.
Added commandline option to podbeuter to automatically start download.
Added "article-sort-order" configuration option to freely configure the sort order of article lists
Added possibility to delete articles
Lots of bug fixes

You can download newsbeuter 0.9 from the usual location.

Do we really need the Ruby scripting support?

With version 0.8, newsbeuter introduced Ruby scripting support, although still undocumented and not really in a usable state. So, the next major release is coming up, and one thing in my head is whether we really need Ruby support in newsbeuter. So far, I couldn’t find any use case where Ruby support would be useful. So the question is: should the Ruby support remain, or should it be removed again? I strongly urge for your thoughts and comments, if nobody presents me a clear case why we would need Ruby support in newsbeuter, I think I will remove it again.

Newsbeuter now has an official logo!

Thanks to Markus Stumpf, newsbeuter now has an official logo:

Newsbeuter 0.8.2 released

Newsbeuter 0.8.2 is out. Get it from the usual locations. This second “brown paper bag” release was necessary as the format string feature wasn’t as stable as expected from previous testing, and the fixes in 0.8.1 didn’t fully cover all cases. So, if you had problems that newsbeuter was crashing in 0.8 or 0.8.1, this latest release is the one to go for.

Newsbeuter 0.8.1 released

Newsbeuter 0.8.1 was just released. The only new thing that this “brown paperbag release” comes with is a fix for a format string bug that made newsbeuter crash on certain non-UTF-8 locale configurations.

Newsbeuter 0.8 released

Get it while it’s hot!

As a reminder, here you can find the most important links:

• Newsbeuter website
• Issue tracker
• Newsbeuter 0.8 new features
• Newsbeuter tips & tricks (everybody’s welcome to contribute)

Have fun with this fresh and wonderful release!

Debian users: you can now safely upgrade newsbeuter and libmrss

The ABI change issues were fixed with a recompile of newsbeuter, so it’s now safe to upgrade again.

Newsbeuter: upcoming features

It’s already been 5 months since the last version of newsbeuter, 0.7, has been released. Since a new release will come out in the next two to three weeks, I want to give you an overview about the new features that you can expect.

First of all, it will be possible to freely configure the format of feed list and article list entries using format strings similar to the ones you probably know from tools like mutt.

Then, the general reload behaviour has been improved: newsbeuter will check the Last-Modified header, and only if there are updates, it will download the whole RSS feed.

What’s also new in the upcoming release is the possibility to rename feeds by using a special tag. When an article is tagged with a tag that starts with the character “@”, the rest of the tag string is used as feed title instead of the actual feed title.

Two features that make newsbeuter even more interesting to customize are the macro support (the possibility to define a list of commands to be executed with a single key kombination) and the integrated Ruby support. The Ruby support provides an almost complete interface to the internals of newsbeuter. So far, the Ruby support is mostly untested, and more work on improving the usability and general documentation need to be done. Nevertheless, this feature will already be in the next release to (hopefully) attract Ruby hackers to write custom extensions to newsbeuter. The Ruby support will be optional, which means that you can compile newsbeuter also without Ruby support and use it as before.

And last, but not least, the everlasting issues with libnxml and libmrss will come to end. Since deliberate API and ABI changes in the past broke the newsbeuter binaries provided by Linux distributions more than once, I finally decided that the dependency on these two libraries must come to an end. I did this by forking these two libraries and directly integrating them into the newsbeuter source tree. I also fixed some bugs (even one crash bug), and forwarded these fixes to the author of libnxml and libmrss. In the future, this code will probably be replaced by a C++-based rewrite, but the current situation is satisfying enough so far.

I hope this gives everyone who is already excited about the upcoming release a good overview what can be expected from the newsbeuter front.

Advise to Debian users: don’t upgrade libmrss!

In the last few weeks, there have been a lot of bug reports about how newsbeuter suddenly stopped reloading feeds. The reason for this issue is that the latest version of libmrss, 0.19.0, made some incompatible ABI changes which broke newsbeuter. So if you haven’t already upgraded libmrss, then don’t do it, and if you have upgraded libmrss, then downgrade to a 0.18.x version of libmrss. Also, please don’t file any additional bug reports, as there are already several handed over to libmrss: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=libmrss;dist=unstable

Don’t worry, a new version of newsbeuter will be out soon, and it won’t depend on libnxml and libmrss anymore, so in the future, there will be no more breakage coming from one of these two libraries.