Re: mh backend

["Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Excerpts from mail: (15-Sep-98) Re: mh backend by =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois Pinard?=
>>>> 1. Message sequences.
>> In MH/nmh, you can give symbolic names to an arbitrary list of
>> numbers.  Then you can manipulate the messages that these numbers
>> represent, by using the message sequence.  [...]

This sounds a lot like RMAIL labels. I know that, at one point, adding
user-customizable labels or annotations to Gnus was on the to-do list, but
it's probably way down on the list.

> Could mailgroups, or submailgroups, be used to similar purposes?  Maybe not,
> if a single message may be part of many sequences simultaneously.  Let's
> assume for a moment it would be possible...

Someone invariably suggests that when the topic of Gnus labels comes up.
Personally, I think subgroups are a very poor alternative.

>> Well, it's common to repack the folder in the MH/nmh world.  The message
>> numbers are not hidden in the background quite as much as in Gnus.
>
> Maybe (just hypothesising :-) because you often need to look at these
> numbers.  If you stopped having this need, probably the need to repack
> would disappear as well?

I think it would be great if Gnus could count articles correctly. However,
someone may have already written a function to pack an nnml group. See the
the following articles on the Gnus mailing list archive:
<http://www.gnus.org/cgi-bin/wilma_glimpse/ding?query=function+to+pack+folders&Search=Search&lineonly=on&errors=0&maxfiles=50&maxlines=10&.cgifields=lineonly&.cgifields=filelist&.cgifields=case&.cgifields=partial&.cgifields=restricttofiles>

>> Yes, limiting takes care of matching on headers, but unless I'm
>> missing something obvious, one cannot limit based on the contents
>> message body.
> For one, I do it with temporary scoring instead. Maybe it would be
> convenient that have a limiting function for that as well? It might be
> slow.

I really think limiting on the body should be added as feature. (If it's not
already. I could have sworn it was!) It would be really useful, I think.

Later,
Ed