Re: Question about article identification and backends.

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Andreas Fuchs <asf@void.at> writes:

> The only problem I see with this approach is that you don't get a
> clean number<->article-id mapping; nnmaildir's solution to this
> problem might also apply for integrating the RMS into gnus.

I think you may be referring to the main thing I'm wondering about --
how difficult would it be for Gnus to change such that it doesn't
require all of the following:

  A few remarks about these article numbers might be useful.  First of
  all, the numbers are positive integers.  Secondly, it is normally
  not possible for later articles to `re-use' older article numbers
  without confusing Gnus.  That is, if a group has ever contained a
  message numbered 42, then no other message may get that number, or
  Gnus will get mightily confused.(1) Third, article numbers must be
  assigned in order of arrival in the group; this is not necessarily
  the same as the date of the message.

i.e. how reasonable might it be, and how difficult the task to change
Gnus to rely on stable unique article ids (global ones -- or at least
global within a backend) rather than stable unique per-group integers?
And given such a change, could Gnus perhaps then just expect an
ordered list of IDs from the backend when it wants the articles in a
group, and not mind if this order changes from backend query to
backend query?

Among other things, I presume this would require Gnus to reorient to
key marks by a group-id/unique-id pair rather than the group/position
pair it uses now.  The sequence position of an article within a group
would either have to be stored independently, or perhaps it could even
be dropped entirely if people were happy with just having by-date (or
maybe by arrival time) sorting -- not a big deal to me either way.

Thanks

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