Question about article identification and backends.

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Right now Gnus appears very dependent on the "group and number" pair
to uniquely identify an article.  This has the unfortunate effect of
making it hard to track an article across moves, or within several
groups, at least without relying on the Message-ID (which I presume
can't be trusted and aren't likely to be fast).

In addition, one of the few things that bothers me about Gnus is the
fact that if I need to file a message from my inbox (or wherever) into
another group which already has a bunch of newer messages, there's no
way to have it inserted in its "arrival sequence" without reordering
all the other messages, possibly destroying the "group and number"
consistency for all the group articles and probably breaking other
Gnus features.

I believe I recall some talk about overhauling the backend interfaces,
and I was just wondering if there was any likelihood that Gnus might
be able to switch to an approach where each message is assigned a
guaranteed unique ID (integer or other) when it's first seen, and
where (at least within a given backend) group membership and
group-sequence information is treated as mutable data.  In part I'm
asking because I don't have a good idea whether or not the assumption
of article "group and number" immutability is just too entrenched to
change.

I had been thinking about this for a while, but this paper (posted by
Andreas) talks about something similar.  Although it uses
hash/timestamp for the unique ids (I think you'd also want to include
the headers in the hash, at least for the UID), for most purposes, I
suspect even just a simple monotonically increasing integer serial
number would be sufficient.

  http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/papers/mailstore.pdf

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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