Xnews Release Archive

The newsgroup news.software.readers is, not surprisingly, about Usenet clients and it is also the de facto support group for Xnews, the documentation for which points the user to that group. Due to popular demand in that newsgroup Blinkynet is pleased to host an archive of many of the Xnews releases. Below you will find copies of 19 of those releases, and a copy of the change log that reflects the code changes in the program from December 1998 through the present.

Because the naming convention for the release has had more than one format since the program's first release (a copy of Luu's announcement is here) on August 19, 1998, some explanation is necessary as to the order of the releases.

The first convention named the "Year Of Xnews" followed by the month and day of the release. So, for instance, had there been a 1999 release on Christmas day, it would have been numbered 2.12.25 - Xnews Year Two, December 25. That continued for a while, until early 2004, when the author lost track of what Year Of Xnews he was in, and then started naming them ??.mm.dd. Yes, with actual question marks in the filename instead of the Xnews Year. That drew enough complaints that he initiated a third format - the best one yet - which was and is yyyy.mm.dd. Thus, you'll see both the Xnews Year formats for older versions and Real Year formats for more recent ones in the list below. There were only two releases with the screwy "??" component in their names, and to avoid using those characters in this archive, they appear below as versions 8.01.14 and 8.01.30, the proper Xnews Year "8" replacing the two question marks.

In the interests of accuracy, but also orderliness, the releases are listed here by release date, which is noted first, followed by the release name. This archive does not pretend to contain every release of the program, but it is believed to be complete starting with the 5.04.25 version.

Here is an explanation of the difference between the "test" versions and xnews-5.04.25.