Re: I can haz cloud idea

[Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca>]

I really think syncing an entire .newsrc.eld file is the wrong approach.

On my home machine, I read lots of nntp groups, which I never want to
read on other machines, so syncing that data is inefficient and risks
data loss if the remote machine updates the .newsrc.eld after I've
done some reading on the local machine.

Similarly, I don't want my imap groups synced, since imap already
handles that.  Syncing this too would be inefficient and risk data loss.

This definitely should be configured on a server by server basis.

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> As for the "merging different views" -- that's not going to happen in
> any meaningful way.  If you're reading stuff offline on two different
> machines (without ever going online), one client is going to win when
> you're finally going online.

If instead of diffs you upload actions like "(mark-read 12 (34 . 37) 44)"
then you get lots of advantages:

- very small amount of data to upload:  a diff would include the old
  data, all the marks that didn't change, and context lines 
- diffs are fragile, as they might not apply cleanly if things get
  out of sync
- this method automatically handles merging to some degree, as instead
  of uploading all marks for a group it only sends the changes

When Gnus wants to get the marks from the server, it'll download a 
baseline list of marks and all of the actions, and apply them
dynamically.  

Eventually the list of actions will get long and the baseline marks
will get rewritten, but this could happen infrequently enough that
the risks of overwriting other data is small.

But I still think using Ted's approach might be better, especially since
I think he offered to host a server.

Dan