Re: nnimap article editing

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:52:02 +0200 David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> wrote: 

DE> Didier Verna <didier@xemacs.org> writes:

>> So am I correct in assuming that we could implement nnimap article
>> editing by simply downloading the article, editing it, destroying the
>> old version and uploading the new one ?

DE> That's how other mail clients do it, e.g. for removing attachments from
DE> articles to save space on the server. The problem with this approach is
DE> that the edited article gets a new UID from the server (and hence a new
DE> article number in Gnus), which can lead to problems regarding sorting,
DE> caching, calculation of article numbers, etc.

This, if implemented, would work for any backend that accepts articles,
not just nnimap.

I don't see a problem with sorting or caching.  Expire the old article,
that's all.  The new one should have the same Message-ID but otherwise
can be completely different.  It doesn't even need the same Message-ID,
it can be treated as a followup if that breaks any functionality.  Users
can deal with this.  We could use the Gnus registry to track things if
necessary, but I can't think of a scenario that requires it.

Ted