assistance

assistance

[Miles Bader]

It's great to see assistants being worked on -- I set up someone with
Gnus the other day, and though newsreading was going, I _could not_
figure out how to set up mail-reading (using maildir)!

I've been using Gnus (and GNUS) for some ungodly length of time (~14
years), and have used it to read mail myself for a long time, so I sorta
knew what variables etc. to look at; I read the texinfo manual[*], read
the code, and read the docstrings, and still couldn't get it to work.  I
suppose I should have starting googling for HOWTOs or something, but at
that point the guy I was helping got too frustrated and gave up for the
day.

[*] Which, despite its size, inevitably seems to describe everything
    _except_ what I'm looking for ... :-(

-Miles
-- 
自らを空にして、心を開く時、道は開かれる

Re: assistance

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 04 Jun 2004, miles@gnu.org wrote:

> It's great to see assistants being worked on -- I set up someone with
> Gnus the other day, and though newsreading was going, I _could not_
> figure out how to set up mail-reading (using maildir)!

I finally got more than one possible choices in an assistant to work,
although I haven't figured out how the jump from the end of one
assistant branch to the next branch should work.  I hoped it would be
simple but it ended up being quite complex, because I tried to avoid
building a full tree every time.  But that may have to be done in the
end...  Is there a library in ELisp for building and traversing
trees?  I don't feel like writing it from scratch if I don't have to.

Check out the current gnus-setup.ast, it's the start of the Gnus
setup assistant and you can render it OK (except for the
multiple-branch traversal I mentioned above).  People should feel
free to contribute to the assistants (code or text!)

Ted