Re: NOV code in Gnus

[kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann)]

Jan Rychter <jan@rychter.com> writes:

> So, I'm thinking about a unified interface for storing and accessing NOV
> data.

Yes.  I think it might be quite a lot of work.  Internally, Gnus is
divided into something that we might call a frontend and the
backends (ie, nnml, nnfolder, nnimap, nnmaildir, ...).  Gnus defines
a so-called backend interface.

When you enter a group, for building the summary buffer the frontend
requests the necessary data from the backend.  The data is passed
through a buffer.  The format of the buffer needs to be either NOV, or
it needs to be a sequence of RFC-822-style message headers.  (I'm not
sure about the separation between the headers for two messages in the
second case.)

I think it might be useful to augment the frontend/backend interface
in such a way that Lisp data is passed instead of buffer contents.

If you don't want to change the backend interface, then your best bet
is to transmogrify the information into NOV format.  That is likely to
be a performance hit over just inserting some file contents...

But I haven't tried it so maybe it would work to generate the NOV
from, say, an SQL data base on the fly.

-- 
~/.signature is: umop ap!sdn    (Frank Nobis)