It took longer than I expected but all the required paperwork went to
the FSF on Wednesday, so hopefully this is now taken care of.

Attached is a patch for nnir.el that does a few things:

1. gnus-summary-nnir-goto-thread implementation for imap. I'm finding
   the thread by searching for all articles that are referenced by the
   original article, or reference any of the articles referenced by the
   original article (i.e. I'm being pretty aggressive in finding the
   thread). It seems quite fast, but if it turns out to be too slow it
   is easily changed.

2. Fixes gnus-completing-read (the recent changeover broke things).

3. Cleans up the autoloads and some obsolete comments. One function was
   still loaded from the old imap.el and I thought it might be prudent
   to move this function into nnir.el (imap-quote-specials) so that
   imap.el can just go away. 

Regards,
Andy