Re: Getting articles asynchronously.....

[Felix Lee <flee@teleport.com>]

> That is an exceedingly bad plan in large newsgroups or groups with large
> articles, such as source or binaries newsgroups.  Emacs will run out of
> memory before it's finished pre-fetching.

well, you pre-fetch to disk, rather than to memory.

> That would require a multithreaded Emacs kernel, something that a) does
> not exist and, b) likely won't exist for quite some time.

you can do most of the job by running subprocesses.  a caching nntp
proxy could take care of asynchronous article fetching.  once you have
that, gnus just needs to add a "maybe-it-would-be-a-good-idea-
to-prefetch-this" entry point to its backend interface.

(async article fetching is on my wishlist-that-I-might-actually-do-
something-about, because "Free Agent" (a Windoze newsreader my
boyfriend uses) is actually much nicer than gnus over a ppp link.  and
there's no way I'm going to run Windoze to use a newsreader.)
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