Re: gnus nnmaildir and notmuch

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> Erik Colson <eco@ecocode.net> writes:
>
>> Erik Colson <eco@ecocode.net> writes:
>>
>>> So this is more of a enhancement request for nnir.
>>
>> And I should definitely RTFM
>>
>> "The nnir group made in this way is an ephemeral group, and some changes
>> are not permanent: aside from reading, moving, and deleting, you can’t
>> act on the original article. But there is an alternative: you can warp
>> (i.e., jump) to the original group for the article on the current line
>> with A W, aka gnus-warp-to-article. Even better, the function
>> gnus-summary-refer-thread, bound by default in summary buffers to A T,
>> will first warp to the original group before it works its magic and
>> includes all the articles in the thread. From here you can read, move
>> and delete articles, but also copy them, alter article marks,
>> whatever. Go nuts."
>>
>> It kinda makes the notmuch search engine loose its purpose, but at least
>> it is documented :)
>
> No, I think this is supposed to work -- at any rate, there is code in
> nnir for handling this. I'll try to take a look later.

Okay, I looked at it, and the basic problem is that marks from ephemeral
groups are explicitly not propagated.

The practical definition of an ephemeral group is, "does it have a
quit-config parameter", ie, will it be made to disappear somehow when
the user leaves the summary. All `gnus-group-ephemeral-p' does is checks
if a quit-config parameter is present.

`gnus-summary-exit' is responsible for making marks permanent. It checks
for a quit-config parameter, and if it's present prevents a whole lot of
stuff from happening -- including making the marks permanent. I opened
an nnir group and manually killed the quit-config parameter, and can
confirm marks were propagated when I exited the group.

So that's where we are. nnir groups are supposed to be ephemeral, but
that means marks won't be propagated. So long as
`gnus-group-make-nnir-group' uses `gnus-group-read-ephemeral-group', we
can't avoid this, as the latter function unconditionally installs a
quit-config parameter.

Andy, I wonder if any of your local changes affect this behavior?

Thanks,
Eric