Re: nnir, gnus-goto-article and such

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:40:54 -0400 Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote: 

DA> in nnregistry.el there are no comments.

There are a few:

#+begin_src lisp
;; This file provides the `nnregistry' Gnus back-end.  It can be used
;; in `gnus-refer-article-method' to quickly search for a message by
;; id, regardless of the back-end that stores it.  See the Gnus manual
;; for usage examples and more information.
#+end_src

but yeah, it's a pretty new package.

DA> in gnus-registry.el it says

DA>   ;; You should also consider using the nnregistry backend to look up
DA>   ;; articles.  See the Gnus manual for more information.

DA> The Gnus manual says almost nothing useful about nnregistry.  It shows
DA> how it can be used in gnus-refer-article-method, and I have done that.

DA> What further enabling do you have in mind?

That was it.  

>> Perhaps it should be automatically loaded when the Gnus registry is
>> initialized.  Andy Cohen did that work IIRC so I don't know if there
>> are any reasons not to do it.  It seems reasonable to me.
>> 
DA> [Aside: it seems like this territory is full of components that
DA> could in principle be nicely generalized, but whose implementation
DA> has only been made to work for one specific usage scenario]
>> 
>> I can't tell, I was not involved with writing these components.  

DA> IIUC from reading elsewhere you rewrote the registry.

I wrote *registry.el but I was talking about nnir.el, nnregistry.el, and
other search functionality.  The registry is not a search engine so I
thought you didn't mean it.  I'm not sure how it could be generalized
and in what direction--tell me what you think.

>> At least for the registry I know it's optional so we can't depend on
>> it.

DA> I'm not sure what "optional" means in this context.  Is Gnus going to
DA> ship without the registry code?

Users should be able to use every aspect of Gnus without calling
`gnus-registru-initialize'.  The memory usage of the gnus-registry, if
we enabled it by default, would be unpleasant for many of our users on
older or less capable machines.  Thus any general Gnus functionality
should not depend on the gnus-registry's availability.

Furthermore the gnus-registry should be treated as a lossy cache.  If
you find something useful, great.  But don't rely on it.  That attitude
lets us expire it more aggressively.  There are "precious" properties
you can set, so for instance the registry marks are not lost, but from
our side we can't expect that.

Ted