From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/52732 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Rob Browning Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Question about article identification and backends. Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 14:56:44 -0500 Sender: ding-owner@lists.math.uh.edu Message-ID: <8765o9cpoj.fsf@raven.i.defaultvalue.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1053201353 23150 80.91.224.249 (17 May 2003 19:55:53 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 19:55:53 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: ding-owner+M1276@lists.math.uh.edu Sat May 17 21:55:52 2003 Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 19H7mZ-00061F-00 for ; Sat, 17 May 2003 21:55:52 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.math.uh.edu) by malifon.math.uh.edu with smtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 19H7nb-0005b0-00; Sat, 17 May 2003 14:56:55 -0500 Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com ([64.157.176.121]) by malifon.math.uh.edu with smtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 19H7nT-0005au-00 for ding@lists.math.uh.edu; Sat, 17 May 2003 14:56:47 -0500 Original-Received: (qmail 15088 invoked by alias); 17 May 2003 19:56:46 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 15083 invoked from network); 17 May 2003 19:56:46 -0000 Original-Received: from dsl093-098-016.wdc1.dsl.speakeasy.net (HELO defaultvalue.org) (postfix@66.93.98.16) by sclp3.sclp.com with SMTP; 17 May 2003 19:56:46 -0000 Original-Received: from raven.i.defaultvalue.org (raven.i.defaultvalue.org [192.168.1.7]) by defaultvalue.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F2E5D2F2 for ; Sat, 17 May 2003 14:56:44 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: by raven.i.defaultvalue.org (Postfix, from userid 1000) id A804D215002; Sat, 17 May 2003 14:56:44 -0500 (CDT) Original-To: ding@gnus.org User-Agent: Gnus/5.1001 (Gnus v5.10.1) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux) Precedence: bulk Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:52732 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:52732 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 GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4