Agent vs unplugged

Agent vs unplugged

[Jaap-Henk Hoepman]

It seems to me that, strictly speaking, the "Agent" and the "unplugged"
mechanism are two separate things. In fact, i thought i had been using the
agent for ages, while in fact i was only using the unplugged mechanism - i use
gnus almost exclusively for reading mail. I found out by browsing the new info
files for ognus reading: 

   * Decide which servers should be covered by the Agent.  If you have a
     mail back end, it would probably be nonsensical to have it covered
     by the Agent.  

Is it possible to use gnus in unplugged mode while not agentizing gnus (i still
do (gnus-agentize) in .gnus.el, but according to the docs that's no longer
necessary...)?

Currently, unpluggedness is presented as one of the features of the agent. 
I think the agent and unpluggedness should be treated seperately.
The reason why is the following:
- unpluggedness is an easy concept, that most people are bound to use:
  Being unplugged means that no checks for new mail or news are made, that
  outgoing messages end up in the queue (instead of being sent straight away),
  and that only locally available messages (i.e. mail in nnml etc or cached
  news (see agent)) can be read. 
- the agent is a much more difficult subject, that appears to be useful only
  for news (and possibly imap), and that allows you to read news messages while
  unplugged, or to keep messages locally that might otherwise ne expired by the
  news server.

Does this make sense to anybody else?

Jaap-Henk

-- 
Jaap-Henk Hoepman           |  I've got sunshine in my pockets
Dept. of Computer Science   |  Brought it back to spray the day
University of Nijmegen      |        Gry "Rocket"
(w) www.cs.kun.nl/~jhh      |  (m) jhh@cs.kun.nl
(t) +31 24 36 52710/531532  |  (f) +31 24 3653137

Re: Agent vs unplugged

[Kai Großjohann]

Jaap-Henk Hoepman <jhh@cs.kun.nl> writes:

> It seems to me that, strictly speaking, the "Agent" and the
> "unplugged" mechanism are two separate things.

Not really, IMHO.

The Agent supports different functionalities: (a) toggle between
plugged and unplugged mode, (b) fetch messages into the `agent cache'
(only when plugged, of course), and (c) allow people to read messages
from the agent cache.  (There's also (d) queue messages while
unplugged, and (e) send queued messages.)

What's the point of (a) alone?

What's the point of being unplugged if the agent cache is empty?  You
can't read any messages then.

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