Re: New approach to grouping/backend/marking - good or bad idea?

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

> A lot can be done with Keywords.  But adding a neater interface for
> tweaking header content would certainly be interesting and useful; as
> it is, you can always `C-u g e' a mail message and add keywords of any
> sort that makes you feel good, including "todo" or whatnot.

All this sounds interesting.  I'll have to look in to it more
carefully...

> As to your suggestion for generalized storage...no, please don't.
> One of the benefits of per-group directory storage is that I can
> simply step into a directory and grep for something interesting.
> Yes, I have nnir.el (and use it heavily -- it has become part of my
> work here) but there is still benefit ultimately in being able to
> ask truly simple UNIX questions of my filesystem.

Well, I envisioned that there would be a shell level tool that would
allow you to generate file lists i.e.

  gnus-find -k debian-devel -a -k -debian-user -not -k debian-policy

or whatever.

So you should be able to do nearly the same things you can do with
separate directories now, including exporting all your stuff as
separate directories if you want.  However, I will certainly concede
that this isn't as straightforward as just having a set of
directories.  I'm sure it makes some things easier and some things
harder.  I just started to think that I might want my mail to be more
like a database than just a collection of files (though I'll always
want to be able to get at it as files).

In any case, I'm beginning to think that overall, for now, I may just
need to switch over to total-expire (if I plan to keep using
crossposting i.e. "&" splits), and just get used to it.  It's too
weird to have an article that's marked as expire in one group get the
read mark in all the others.

And although I'd rather use the expiry process, I suppose I can just
use 'B del' when I want to remove a crossposted article from the
current group, but not affect it elsewhere, though I'd still like to
have control over what happens to marks on crossposts.  And finally,
unless I physically renumber my articles, I think I can always use the
filesystem location as a "permanent pointer".

I'll have to think about that for a bit...

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930