Re: mail split with multiple backends

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> What are the implications?  Sorry if I appear to be dense.

No not at all.  I just didn't figure anyone would care, so I didn't
elaborate.  Unless you had psychic powers, you couldn't have known
what I meant :>

My problems, and perhaps they're just mine, were that given
crossposting, cross-referencing, and the various expiry behaviors, it
was really hard for me to know, on any intuitive level, or with any
feeling of confidence, exactly what might happen when I hit, say "B
del" or "E", or "d" on a given article.  Especially since, unless I'm
recalling wrong, marks are *not* handled consistently (i.e. I think I
recall that "E" propagates as "r" if crossreferencing is on in certain
circumstances!)

After I had a couple of surprises, once I sat down, read the docs more
carefully, looked at some of the source, and thought a bit about it, I
realized that it was probably doing more or less what I told it to,
though that wasn't what I expected.

For example, in news, crossreference handling is something I generally
want.  If I read an article (or kill it), I don't want to see it again
in another group.  For mail, though, say I have rules that'll
crosspost anything addressed to me directly and to debian-bugs to my
"inbox" and my "debian-bugs" groups.  I do this so that I won't
accidentally miss something important in the thousands of messages
that go into my debian-bugs group.  However, most of the time, when a
bug pops up in my inbox (and debian-bugs), I just want to delete the
one in my inbox, after seeing it, and then later, when I start working
on the bug, go over to my debian-bugs group and find/use/reply-to the
copy there.

When I first got started, I just figured, "no problem", I'll just
expire/mark-as-read the one in my inbox and that'll do the trick.
Unfortunately, since I had crossreferencing turned on (because I
generally wanted it for news) the other article was deleted as well.
It took me a while to realize what was going on, and by then I had
lost quite a lot of articles.  This was further complicated (and
unfortunately I don't recall the exact details) by the totally
unexpected handling of "E" across groups in the context of
crossreferencing.

Ignoring my misunderstanding for a minute, as a utility issue, I tend
to feel that there should be separate commands for "mark this article
as <FOO>" and "mark this article and all cross references as <FOO>".
It would be nice to be able to hit "d" for mark as deleted, and "C-u
d" to get all the cross-references too.  It might also be nice to have
a per-backend flag so that you could invert the sense of these
commands.  That way I could set the flag oppositely for my mail and
news backends.  In one "d" means mark this article.  In the other,
"d" means mark this article and all crossreferences.

As I said, perhaps all of this is just a still-not-quite-resolved
difference between the way I tend to want to think about/do things
mail related, and what gnus wants, but all these little incidents have
kinda added up -- hence my current disucssion.  Gnus seems to be so
close to exactly what I want out of a MUA -- so I'm just wondering if
I can help fix up those last bits, presuming I can acutally figure out
exactly what I want :>

Just having *really* clear documentation of what's supposed to happen
would help a lot.  Things like the "E"/"r" issue should be documented
-- I had to look at the code -- I suspect, though, that if all the
expiry/read/E/r/crossreference behaviors were documented, we may see
that some configurations produce behaviours that just don't make
sense.  Then we could set about deciding what would make sense,
documenting that, and then fixing up the code.

When I was browsing the source, it seemed like the whole "marks"
infrastructure needs a major overhaul.  As I suggested earlier, it
might be beneficial to change it so that marks are just lists of
symbols attached to articles.  The expire mark, for example, and it's
relation to readedness and deletion in the code made it seem like "E"
isn't quite a full fledged citizen -- it doesn't play nice with
scoring, and as it doesn't seem to work well with crossposting,
behaving better or worse depending on the target group's expiry
policy.  If 'expire was a mark that was completely separate from 'read
and if an article could have each mark independently '(expire read), I
think many of those problems might go away...

Thanks, and hope that wasn't too confusing.
-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930