From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/30868 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Rob Browning Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Trying to document some of gnus' darkish corners -- please help. Date: 12 May 2000 12:09:44 -0500 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: <873dnn3dbb.fsf@raven.localnet> References: <87vh0kpv22.fsf@raven.localnet> <200005121558.RAA12395@marcy.cs.uni-dortmund.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035167346 10782 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 02:29:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 02:29:06 +0000 (UTC) Cc: ding@gnus.org Return-Path: Original-Received: from lisa.math.uh.edu (lisa.math.uh.edu [129.7.128.49]) by mailhost.sclp.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C0E7D051E for ; Fri, 12 May 2000 13:10:16 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu (lists@Sina.HPC.UH.EDU [129.7.3.5]) by lisa.math.uh.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id MAB08848; Fri, 12 May 2000 12:10:14 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Fri, 12 May 2000 12:09:41 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from mailhost.sclp.com (postfix@sclp3.sclp.com [204.252.123.139]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA12045 for ; Fri, 12 May 2000 12:09:29 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from mail11.jump.net (mail11.jump.net [207.8.124.20]) by mailhost.sclp.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 57756D051E for ; Fri, 12 May 2000 13:09:48 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from cust-53-56.customer.jump.net (cust-35-56.customer.jump.net [216.30.73.56]) by mail11.jump.net (8.9.0/) with ESMTP id MAA15314; Fri, 12 May 2000 12:09:50 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from raven.localnet (raven.localnet [192.168.1.7]) by cust-53-56.customer.jump.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id E5BDE278E9; Fri, 12 May 2000 12:09:44 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: by raven.localnet (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 451E5AEA7; Fri, 12 May 2000 12:09:44 -0500 (CDT) Original-To: Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai =?iso-8859-1?q?Gro=DFjohann?=) In-Reply-To: Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE's message of "Fri, 12 May 2000 17:58:37 +0200 (MET DST)" Original-Lines: 115 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0806 (Gnus v5.8.6) Emacs/20.6 Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:30868 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:30868 Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Gro=DFjohann) writes: > I don't know, but it is reasonable not to expect Gnus to do so, since > `spooling' is what happens when Gnus retrieves messages from /var/mail > or the POP server (or wherever). And obviously, messages don't have > any marks there. Yes, unfortunately it was *after* I had done it, I recalled that this was probably the case. > Maybe you really wanted to move the messages? That preserves marks. > There is a variable gnus-move-split-methods which is similar to > nnmail-split-methods but suggests default groups to move to when > doing `B m'. Yes, but I was respolling 4800 messages because I was breaking up a group that used to have a number of mailing lists dumped into it into separate groups for each, and I *definitely* didn't want to loose my marks. So having default suggestions 4800 times wouldn't be all that helpful :> As people get more sophisticated with gnus, it seems reasonable to expect that they might want to go back and "re-work" their config as I described, splitting up groups, etc. For this case, it would be really nice to have some other command that's essentially the same as respool, except that it preserves the marks, though I have no idea how hard that would be to implement. Also, is moving (B m) and copying guaranteed to preserve marks, and what about (B del), does that one affect other cross-posted articles, marking them as read too? I guess I'll have to do some experimentation, but in then end I'd really like to get this documented so it's "official behavior". > > 2) When you mark a crossposted article, what's supposed to happen= to > > the other copies? >=20 > Yes, this is a painful situation. When you read a crossposted > article, the other instances are marked as read. Apparently, marking > an article as expirable counts as `reading' it. Yep. Now that I think back, I recall looking at the code, and I think I recall that there was only one function called to handle the marking, and it just called a "mark as read" function which even ignored the setting of auto-expiry for the group in question. That's my recollection anyhow. =20 > A couple of years ago (I think) we discussed whether it would be > useful to make the marking behavior of Gnus more orthogonal and > predictable. This would be *GREAT*, but I doubt it's going to happen anytime soon, and I'm not in a position to fix it, so what I'd really like to do is gather as much information as I can about the way things *are*, and make sure that's readily available so that others are less likely to fall into the cracks that I did. > The idea was that there should be commands to apply a mark to the > current instance only, and other commands to apply a mark to all > instances, and maybe commands that do what they do now. Frankly, if it's possible to implement efficiently, I'd love to see a system where the idea of a fixed set of marks is juked altogether and we just go to a system where each article can have a set of tags (symbols) associated with it. Then gnus would have a reserved set of symbols for the things it's doing now (gnus-read, gnus-dormant, gnus-unticked, etc. -- say anything that starts with gnus- is reserved for internal use), and all of the current processes just become functions that traverse articles checking for certain tags and taking appropriate actions. Users, and add on packages, would be allowed to add their own tags too and could tell gnus how to handle them. This would immediately let me solve my "I need at least one more state in addition to ticked and dormant" problem that I've prattled on about off and on for a while now... Given the "tags" setup, it would then be nice to have hooks like an article marked hook where you could define a function that was given the article, the cross-posted articles, and the old and new marks as arguments and then you could do what you wanted to the crossposts. There could also be some default hook functions available that handled things in the most common ways. > I think that especially the `apply this mark to all copies' commands > could be really useful. > As it is, I don't use cross posts. I guess I'm about to quit, but it's a shame that something that might be so useful, and *is* so useful for news is more or less, from my perspective, useless for mail. The reason I switched on crossposting in the first place was that I'm on *very* high volume lists, and now and then, without cross-posting, people would send something urgent to me and to the list, that would only get filed to the list, and I wouldn't see it for way-too-long(TM). This was bad. I suppose that instead of crossposting, I could fix thisby either: 1) Turning off gnus-use-cross-reference, but this would make me loose this for news as well, which is arguably not what I'd want. 2) Continue to cross-post, but just use (B del) to kill the article in my inbox and then deal with it in the other group. This presumes that (B del) doesn't mess with crossposted marks. 3) Turning off all cross-posting in my split-method and just file things that are to me and a list to my inbox first, so I'll see it, and then I'll just have to re-file it by hand (this seems the best for now)... Thanks for the help. --=20 Rob Browning PGP=3DE80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930