10.9.1 Installation

Question 1.1:		What is the latest version of Gnus?
Question 1.2:		What's new in 5.10.0?
Question 1.3:		Where and how to get Gnus?
Question 1.4:		What to do with the tarball now?
Question 1.5:		Which version of Emacs do I need?
Question 1.6:		How do I run Gnus on both Emacs and XEmacs?

Question 1.1:

What is the latest version of Gnus?

Answer:

Jingle please: Gnus 5.10.0 is released, get it while it's hot! As well as the step in version number is rather small, Gnus 5.10 has tons of new features which you shouldn't miss, however if you are cautious, you might prefer to stay with 5.8.8 respectively 5.9 (they are basically the same) until some bugfix releases are out.

Question 1.2:

What's new in 5.10.0?

Answer:

First of all, you should have a look into the file GNUS-NEWS in the toplevel directory of the Gnus tarball, there the most important changes are listed. Here's a short list of the changes I find especially important/interesting:

• Major rewrite of the Gnus agent, Gnus agent is now active by default.
• Many new article washing functions for dealing with ugly formatted articles.
• Anti Spam features.
• message-utils now included in Gnus.
• New format specifiers for summary lines, e.g. %B for a complex trn-style thread tree.

Question 1.3:

Where and how to get Gnus?

Answer:

The latest released version of Gnus isn't included in Emacs 21 and until now it also isn't available through the package system of XEmacs 21.4, therefor you should get the Gnus tarball from http://www.gnus.org/dist/gnus.tar.gz or via anonymous FTP from ftp://ftp.gnus.org/pub/gnus/gnus.tar.gz.

Question 1.4:

What to do with the tarball now?

Answer:

Untar it via `tar xvzf gnus.tar.gz' and do the common `./configure; make; make install' circle. (under MS-Windows either get the Cygwin environment from http://www.cygwin.com which allows you to do what's described above or unpack the tarball with some packer (e.g. Winace from http://www.winace.com) and use the batch-file make.bat included in the tarball to install Gnus. If you don't want to (or aren't allowed to) install Gnus system-wide, you can install it in your home directory and add the following lines to your ~/.xemacs/init.el or ~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/gnus/lisp") (if (featurep 'xemacs) (add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "/path/to/gnus/texi/") (add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "/path/to/gnus/texi/"))

Make sure that you don't have any Gnus related stuff before this line, on MS Windows use something like "C:/path/to/lisp" (yes, "/").

Question 1.5:

Which version of Emacs do I need?

Answer:

Gnus 5.10.0 requires an Emacs version that is greater than or equal to Emacs 20.7 or XEmacs 21.1.

Question 1.6:

How do I run Gnus on both Emacs and XEmacs?

Answer:

You can't use the same copy of Gnus in both as the Lisp files are byte-compiled to a format which is different depending on which Emacs did the compilation. Get one copy of Gnus for Emacs and one for XEmacs.