Re: nnir, gnus-goto-article and such

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:19:38 -0400 Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote: 

DA> on Wed Sep 28 2011, Ted Zlatanov <tzz-AT-lifelogs.com> wrote:

>>>> or by subject, or by sender?  
>> 
DA> You can't split by subject or sender without the registry?!  You're
DA> kidding, right?  Like I said, I never ask Gnus to shuffle mail into
DA> different folders for me but that seems pretty basic.
>> 
>> No, I mean it will split to the same group as other articles with the
>> same subject or sender.  So if I put your mails in "dave" it will figure
>> out it should keep putting new ones in there.

DA> ...which always seemed wrong to me.  Some subject lines (e.g. "FYI") are
DA> so common that it's not a good guide to threading.  Since the message
DA> has References: and In-Reply-To: headers, why not use those?

We do, that's what splitting by parent does.  But many clients don't do
it properly.

In my experience subject lines don't recur that often but yeah that's
one possible way to misfile a message.

Splitting by sender and recipient is less prone to such homonymous
accidents.

DA> What's a user going to *do* with registry marks?  That's another tool
DA> whose real utility escapes me.
>> 
>> It lets the user define any marks they want, without reconfiguring Gnus
>> and without storing them in the newsrc.eld, by message-ID and not
>> article number.

DA> IIRC, IMAP lets you do that anyway?  But anyway, again, why would I want
DA> to define new marks?  I guess I can think of a use-case, but marks that
DA> don't follow me to other mail clients are pretty limited.

Most backends, especially NNTP, don't let you define marks at all.  The
whole point of custom marks is that we (the Gnus developers) haven't
thought of them yet.  The example ones are To-Do, Later, Work, and
Personal.  I add Perl and a few work-related tags that would make no
sense for anyone else.

>>>> (defun gnus-registry-handle-action (id from to subject sender
>>>> &optional recipients)
>> 
DA> Umm, sorry.  That function isn't documented.  How do I use it?  How
DA> would I get the group that gnus-summary-refer-article finds the message
DA> in into the registry?  I don't even see a parameter for group.
>> 
>> id = message ID, a string
>> from = source group, nil in your case for a new article

DA> nil is not useful to me; the whole point of this exercise is to record
DA> the group associated with an article.

start with article groups = (A C) in each case below;

from = nil, to = B: article created/noticed in group B => (A B C)
from = A, to = B: article move from A to B => (B C)
from = A, to = nil: article registry deletion from group A => (C)

DA> What I'd want to do with the registry is get gnus-summary-refer-article
DA> to put in the registry the group in which it finds the article, so
DA> gnus-warp-to-article will go to *that* group when I try to get to the
DA> whole thread.

DA> I don't think I want gnus to remember that the article is in my group.
DA> I want it to be like an nnir group, where Gnus remembers the group in
DA> which the article was originally found.

from = nil, to = noticed_group

DA> Note: nnir doesn't use the registry, but has its *own* record of which
DA> group was the source of each article.  Why?  Dunno.

The registry is an optional package so nnir doesn't require it.  The
nnregistry backend tracks articles through the registry.

Ted