gnus-sync work (was: Trying to get gnus-sync working with plink)

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 23:28:16 +0200 Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote: 

SB> I've given up on the couchdb route, all that happens when trying to
SB> initialize couchdb 1.4.0 is that I'm getting strange error messages,
SB> like e.g. a 404 on /sb/_design/lesync (my base is named "sb" and not
SB> "tzz"), and /var/couchdb/couchdb.log fils up with JSON dumps with error
SB> messages I don't understand.

Yeah... I haven't used this in years and CouchDB has not been a fun
environment. It was a mistake for me to rely on it.

Lars had agreed to use IMAP as the sync backend and started work on
that, but I don't know the current status (I ask this question once a
year, sorry). The ultimate goal is to host the newsrc.eld entirely
inside IMAP. My work with Tramp to support file access over IMAP (now
removed because it was not used by anyone) could have been part of that,
but clearly an atomic file would not work, we need to break out the
records for each group so they can be updated independently.

Using the Gnus slave code seems clever but would be a mistake, I think
(because the assumption with Gnus slaves is that a master will
eventually come along and gather the dribble files). Another way of
looking at it is that Gnus needs to be in perpetual slave mode, there
should be no master.

In a modern environment, I think there are many choices for distributed
databases but I think IMAP remains the best way to synchronize data
across multiple news readers even though it's a terrible data protocol.
Partly that's because it already synchronizes mail through article
marks. But I'm not sure, honestly.

Opinions welcome.

Ted