Re: new user assistant

["Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sat, 22 May 2004, rdh@yottayotta.com wrote:

> However, if the assistant is meant to help novice users set things up,
> it should noted that they're the ones who are completely ignorant of
> the meanings of nnml versus nnmaildir versus nnimap, etc, so a simple
> menu for the backends actually won't help them very much.

What would you suggest?  At some point, a minimal knowledge of the
desired mail storage is necessary, otherwise the user doesn't know
what to ask for, and we can't teach them how files and directories
work.

For example, nnml is a very bad storage choice for home directories
with small quotas - nnimap is much better in those cases.  nnmaildir
works better than nnml over NFS.

If you have ideas, you don't have to write code.  Write the text of
the assistant, and I or other Gnus developers can fill in the code.

> How would you write an assistant that tried to either (a) discover
> what the user might want to do based on environment vars and other
> pre-exisiting information, or (b) queried the user for such
> information, and then presented him with a suitable (aye, there's the
> rub) initial configuration?

That's impossible.  We can assist with tasks, but we can't make
guesses that are almost certainly wrong.  The number of possible
configurations and the ways in which they can be guessed wrongly is
much greater than what Gnus developers have time for, IMHO.

> Do you want this language to be able to handle the maintenance of
> configurations or just the initial creation of such a configuration?

Just creation for now!  It's hard enough to do an initial setup, I
don't want to spend time creating a configuration maintenance system
as well.

> Ie, I have both nnml and nnimap mail groups in my gnus setup.  Suppose
> I used an assistant to set up my first nnml group.  Would the language
> you're thinking about support writing an assistant that would walk me
> through adding a nnimap mailing group?

There could be an assistant that *adds* a nnimap group.  That's not
too bad.

Ted