Re: search engine for virtual group?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Tuesday,  1 Feb 2022 at 09:29, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>> (FTR that was Andy Cohen's work, not mine)
>
> Ah, yes, sorry Andy!
>
>> That does make sense, and it's something to think about and possibly
>> address. So you had to M-g on the nnselect group in particular to get it
>> to refresh?
>
> I've been re-reading the documentation and it does state you can set it
> for automatic rescan.  The problem now is figuring out how to create the
> group I want.  nnvirtual is very good for this as it's straightforward.
> nnselect is somewhat opaque.
>
> How do I create a group that combines all those nnml groups with the
> following pattern, for instance:
>
>    nnml\\+somename:mail\\.*
>
> ?

Right, that's what I was saying in my original message: I'm pretty sure
this is possible, but I don't know the correct syntax. Once that's
sorted out, then we could add a convenience function that makes
"virtual" style select groups easier to create.

I just fooled around with this and couldn't get it to work, so I'm
cc'ing Andy to see what he thinks.

Andy, do you have a recommendation for how to make an nnselect group
that works just the same as an nnvirtual group: i.e. simply collects
several other groups and dumps them into one big one?

I tried doing it using gnus-search, like this:

(nnselect-request-create-group
 "family" nil '((nnselect-specs
      (nnselect-function . gnus-search-run-query)
      (nnselect-args
       (search-query-spec
        (query . "*"))
       (search-group-spec
        ("nnimap:NEA" "family.Dad" "family.Mom"))))))

But it gave me:

nnselect-request-update-info: Wrong type argument: consp, nil

Which I haven't looked into further. But maybe the right approach is a
custom 'nnselect-function, where the `nnselect-args is the list of
groups to combine, and then the function just... returns all the
articles in those groups? Or something?

Thanks for any hints!

Eric