Re: gnus nnmaildir and notmuch

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Andrew Cohen <cohen@bu.edu> writes:

> Already done in my private version (sans documentation). But I don't
> want to do it now since I'd rather finish the factoring I mentioned
> previously. This factoring would lead to incompatible changes in
> people's setups (mostly renaming, but still...)

[...]

> This is also already done in my personal version. 

Okay, looking forward to it!

>     Eric> As for the backends... It seems like there are too many
>     Eric> backends already. Why don't we just hijack nnvirtual? nnselect
>     Eric> sounds like it would be exactly like nnvirtual, except with
>     Eric> the ability to specify articles in addition to groups. It
>     Eric> would be more work to merge the two, but I think it would make
>     Eric> much more sense all around. Virtual groups would be any kind
>     Eric> of virtual group, and then there'd just be a search interface
>     Eric> laid on top of it.
>
> Merging with nnvirtual doesn't make any sense: the functionality of
> nnvirtual (combining existing groups to act as a single group) can
> already be done directly as part of nnselect. And the approach taken in
> nnvirtual to doing this is radically different from the one I adopted
> for nnir (which makes sense since most of the hard work in nnir doesn't
> exist for merging entire groups). So the choice is to either eliminate
> nnvirtual entirely and replace it with nnselect (possibly renaming in
> the process) or let both co-exist. Since replacing it would break things
> for anyone using it I favor leaving it alone (unless it turns out that
> no one is using it). Over time we can then consider eliminating
> nnvirtual. 

Sure, by "merging" I just meant that we don't need both of them -- I was
also assuming that the code from nnir/nnselect would mostly replace
nnvirtual. Co-existence is fine, though it will be confusing for people
exploring Gnus. Perhaps if the docs emphasize nnselect, and only mention
nnvirtual in terms of backwards compatibility, it wouldn't be a big
deal.

Eric