combining multiple gnus configurations?

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@cygnus.com>]

(Please forgive me for not consulting the list archives, I'm not
connected at the moment, and only have a 14.4 connection available now
anyways.  There's nothing about this in the mail I have saved away
though.)

I use Gnus at home and at work.  At work, I use our local news server
as my native server, and an nnml secondary.  At home, I use an nnml
native server (totally separate from the nnml data at work), and pull
in a few newsgroups from the nntp server at work.

Right now, I'm travelling.  I've copied both configurations and spool
areas onto my laptop, and set up a POP server at home.  I moved most of
the differing config information into .gnus (which I've renamed and
stuffed in the spool areas).  Now I can read "work" mail and news, and
it works fine.  I can read "home" mail and news, and it works fine too.

I can't do both at once, though, and I'd like to.  I don't want to quit
Gnus and restart to go between them.  I don't want to contact the nntp
server twice (especially not from the hotel room!).  And I don't want
to run two big Emacsen on this little laptop; I don't currently have
the RAM to keep them and X active, never mind with Netscape or gcc
running too.

Is there any hope?

Right now I've got two ideas:

1. Hack Gnus so I can run two sessions simultaneously, feeding them
different configuration information.  Most of the interesting global
state would have to be made "per-session", and each buffer would need
to retain info about which session it belongs to.

This would still leave me with two nntp connections, but would at least
let me read both mail spools.

2. Merge the two (well, for generality, N) configurations to get one,
and separate it into two (N) when I'm done.

The state to be combined would include .newsrc.eld, the native and
secondary select methods, and the cache.  (Probably other stuff too,
that I don't use.)

The combination could be done on the fly, with data read from or
written to multiple configuration areas depending on where the group
concerned came from.  Or it could be done as one big batch job,
producing a combined configuration that can be saved away, or split
apart again when desired.

This assumes the presentation control variables and other global state
are the same, with only per-server differences.  That's not completely
true, but I could probably deal with that restriction.  *If* the nntp
servers can be combined reasonably (requiring matching per-server
variables, after copying the global settings into each server?), I'd
need only one connection to the server.


I think the latter sounds easier, though neither sounds like my idea of
a fun time.  Before I either start coding or give up and suffer with
the status quo (haven't decided yet), I thought I'd see if anyone had
comments, suggestions, code, free laptop memory :-), or anything....

Ken

P.S.  Yes, I'm thinking about buying more laptop RAM.  But I often *do*
want Gnus and Netscape and gcc all running at the same time, so I'm not
convinced I won't still want this.  Heck, I want them all running, and
I want to be able to edit files while Gnus is fetching info from the
servers.  (Poor little 486 can hardly keep up with me...)  And more
laptop memory doesn't help with the multiple nntp server connections.