getting nndiary to work

getting nndiary to work

[lee]

Hi,

I´m trying to get nndiary to work. I followed the documentation and put
settings for nndiary into ~/.gnus:


,----
| (add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods
| 	     '(nntp "news1.open-news-network.org")
| 	     '((nndiary "diary") (nndiary-get-new-mail t)))
| 
| (add-hook 'gnus-select-group-hook 'gnus-group-set-timestamp)
| ;;(setq nndiary-get-new-mail t)
| (setq nndiary-mail-sources '((file :path "~/.nndiary")))
| (setq nndiary-split-methods
|       '(("nndiary:diary"
| 	 "")))
| (setq nndiary-week-starts-on-monday t)
`----


After some searching, I found a posting saying that you need to create
the nndiary group manually. After creating it, I have a group
"nndiary:diary". When starting gnus, there´s a message in the minibuffer
about opening the nndiary server.

Unfortunately, nndiary doesn´t do anything. I can send myself nndiary
messages that do get delivered into ~/.nndiary, and nndiary seems to
ignore them. I can copy or move nndiary messages into the nndiary group
and it´s not any different from moving or copying messages to other
groups.

I can enter the group and view the messages just as with other
groups. When starting to write a mail while in the group, the nndiary
headers are inserted automatically.

What am I missing?

Re: getting nndiary to work

[Didier Verna]

lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:

> Unfortunately, nndiary doesn´t do anything.

  I've just sent myself a new diary message with all X-Diary header set
to * and X-Diary-Minute to 45, and it's popping up as new as expected.

Messages from diary groups are supposed to be renewed according to the
value of nndiary-reminders, maybe that's what you're missing ?

One thing which does seem to NOT work anymore, though, is C-u a on a
diary group (that's supposed to do local-posting only thanks to the
request-post method).

-- 
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.

Scientific site:   http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier
Music (Jazz) site: http://www.didierverna.com

Re: getting nndiary to work

[Steinar Bang]

What I've been missing with nndiary is a good step-by-step example that
explains how to use it.

I tried using it once, but gave up.

Re: getting nndiary to work

[Didier Verna]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote:

> What I've been missing with nndiary is a good step-by-step example
> that explains how to use it.

  Maybe I should re-read the documentation again, and see if I can come
up with a quick start section. I'm still using it (for birthdays) but I
must admit I haven't touched the code in years.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I really want to spend anymore time on
it. At the time I wrote it, making a new backend for this facility was a
convenient way to go, but now I have another idea, which presumably is
much more difficult to implement:

the idea is that the "diary behavior" should not depend on any backend
at all. Ideally, you want any article to behave in a diary-fashion, so
you add the proper set of extra headers[1] to the article and then, it
pops up as new from time to time, according to your reminder settings,
whether it be from nnml, gmail, nntp, whatever.


Footnotes: 
[1]  not even the current X-Diary ones. Maybe something more cal-like.

-- 
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.

Scientific site:   http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier
Music (Jazz) site: http://www.didierverna.com

Re: getting nndiary to work

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Didier Verna <didier@xemacs.org>:

> the idea is that the "diary behavior" should not depend on any backend
> at all. Ideally, you want any article to behave in a diary-fashion, so
> you add the proper set of extra headers[1] to the article and then, it
> pops up as new from time to time, according to your reminder settings,
> whether it be from nnml, gmail, nntp, whatever.

I guess that what one would want is something that is synchronized with
other calendar-ish things, ie. org-mode, emacs diary, remote calendar
servers...?

A mail backend where one can easily create appointments, and receive
notifications, and all of the created appointments go into the other
calendaring stuff, and events in the other calendaring stuff causes
messages to appear in this backend.

Or something...?

Re: getting nndiary to work

[Didier Verna]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote:

> I guess that what one would want is something that is synchronized
> with other calendar-ish things, ie. org-mode, emacs diary, remote
> calendar servers...?

  yes, but ...

> A mail backend

  precisely not. I'd want any message, from any mail or news or coffee
backend to behave as a calendar event, with customized alerts
(reminders) consisting of renew'ing the message as nndiary does.

-- 
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.

Scientific site:   http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier
Music (Jazz) site: http://www.didierverna.com

Re: getting nndiary to work

[Didier Verna]

I wrote:

>   precisely not. I'd want any message, from any mail or news or coffee
> backend to behave as a calendar event, with customized alerts
> (reminders) consisting of renew'ing the message as nndiary does.

  Just to give you a concrete example: I receive a Call for Papers by
mail or news. What I'm doing right now is copy the message to my
[nn]diary:conferences group, and set up the X-Diary headers to the
deadline. What I would prefer to do is exactly the same, except that the
message would stay in its original group.

-- 
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.

Scientific site:   http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier
Music (Jazz) site: http://www.didierverna.com

Re: getting nndiary to work

[lee]

Didier Verna <didier@xemacs.org> writes:

>   Just to give you a concrete example: I receive a Call for Papers by
> mail or news. What I'm doing right now is copy the message to my
> [nn]diary:conferences group, and set up the X-Diary headers to the
> deadline. What I would prefer to do is exactly the same, except that the
> message would stay in its original group.

Some things come to mind (just to give you some ideas):

Save information about a message in an additional file. That could
include reminder settings as well as comments. Perhaps headers could be
used for such information, or headers could point to the file that holds
additional information about the message.

Make use of links. Gnus could create a link in an nndiary group to point
to your message calling for papers. Something like that ...

Use "internal" messages gnus sends itself: Instead of copying your
conference message to an nndiary group, have gnus send itself a message
telling it that it needs to remind you of the message calling for
papers. You would just tell gnus that you want to be reminded of this
particular message, and gnus transparently does whatever is needed. ---
This might require introducing some sort of unique message ID for every
message and ways to find messages by their unique IDs. It might get a
little hairy when you have told gnus to remind you of a message and
later you happen to expire the message you wanted to be reminded of ...

Re: getting nndiary to work

[lee]

Didier Verna <didier@xemacs.org> writes:

> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote:
>
>> What I've been missing with nndiary is a good step-by-step example
>> that explains how to use it.
>
>   Maybe I should re-read the documentation again, and see if I can come
> up with a quick start section.

There are a few things that could be improved upon in the documentation:


* The documentation doesn't mention that one must create the nndiary
  group manually for it to appear in the group view.

* It is unclear if one needs to set nndiary-split-methods.

* If is unclear if one needs to set nndiary-reminders. There's no
  description about what to set it to.

* There has been a discussion on this list concerning
  nndiary-get-new-mail in 2007. The question was whether
  nndiary-get-new-mail is a server variable or not and if it needs to be
  set when adding the nndiary backend to gnus-secondary-select-methods,
  or if it can be set independently. Some of the articles of this
  discussion were not available on gmane (anymore).

  The conclusion seemed to be that nndiary-get-new-mail is a server
  variable. I found that when setting it in the backend specification as
  suggested in the discussion, byte-compiling gnus.el yields an error
  message about it. The documentation tells one to just set it with a
  setq-statement somewhere.

> the idea is that the "diary behavior" should not depend on any backend
> at all. Ideally, you want any article to behave in a diary-fashion, so
> you add the proper set of extra headers[1] to the article and then, it
> pops up as new from time to time, according to your reminder settings,
> whether it be from nnml, gmail, nntp, whatever.

Yes, that's one of the things I'd have use for: a way to tell gnus to
show me a particular message (email) at a specified date and time. It
would also be nice if I could add comments to messages, like a comment
telling me why I have made it so that gnus shows me the message just
then.

The other thing I'm looking for is a calendar application like plan or
korganizer for the overview they provide, showing me a whole month and
its weeks and the reminders for each day. Such application must be able
to send reminders by email --- and their inability to do that is what
keeps me from using plan or korganizer.

I haven't really tried calendar applications available in emacs
yet. Perhaps there's already one that does what I need?

> Footnotes: 
> [1]  not even the current X-Diary ones. Maybe something more cal-like.

Hm. The way they are, they have their advantages. Another header could
be added, like "X-Diary-simple", which just takes a date and time and
assumes the current time zone:

  X-Dairy-simple: 2011-06-23, 21:00

That would send me a reminder in about 14 minutes from now :)

Re: getting nndiary to work

[lee]

Didier Verna <didier@xemacs.org> writes:

> lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, nndiary doesn´t do anything.
>
>   I've just sent myself a new diary message with all X-Diary header set
> to * and X-Diary-Minute to 45, and it's popping up as new as expected.
>
> Messages from diary groups are supposed to be renewed according to the
> value of nndiary-reminders, maybe that's what you're missing ?

Yes, that was missing. I looked at [1] and added


  (setq nndiary-reminders '((7 . day) (0 . day) (60 . minute) (15
    . minute) (0 . minute)))


Having set nndiary-reminders does make a difference in that nndiary now
reads incoming mail and removes it from the ~/.nndiary mbox-file. It
prints messages into the message buffer about it like:


,---- [ *Messages* ]
| Reading active file from diary via nndiary...
| Opening nndiary server on diary...done
| nndiary: Reading incoming mail from file...
| Wrote /home/lee/News/diary/nndiary:diary/12
| nndiary: Reading incoming mail (1 new)...done
| Reading active file from diary via nndiary...done
| Reading active file from news1.open-news-network.org via nntp...
`----


However, mail read by nndiary doesn't show up anywhere in gnus, and I'm
not getting any reminders. The files seem to be there, though:


,---- [ lee@yun:~$ ls -laR ~/News/diary/ ]
| /home/lee/News/diary/:
| insgesamt 20
| drwxr-xr-x 4 lee lee 4096 23. Jun 20:51 .
| drwxr-xr-x 7 lee lee 4096 23. Jun 15:23 ..
| -rw-r--r-- 1 lee lee   33 23. Jun 20:51 active
| drwxr-xr-x 2 lee lee 4096 16. Jun 16:32 diary
| drwxr-xr-x 2 lee lee 4096 23. Jun 20:51 nndiary:diary
| 
| /home/lee/News/diary/diary:
| insgesamt 20
| drwxr-xr-x 2 lee lee 4096 16. Jun 16:32 .
| drwxr-xr-x 4 lee lee 4096 23. Jun 20:51 ..
| -rw------- 1 lee lee 1158 16. Jun 12:39 1
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  486 16. Jun 16:32 2
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  354 16. Jun 16:32 .overview
| 
| /home/lee/News/diary/nndiary:diary:
| insgesamt 60
| drwxr-xr-x 2 lee lee 4096 23. Jun 20:51 .
| drwxr-xr-x 4 lee lee 4096 23. Jun 20:51 ..
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  950 23. Jun 02:05 1
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  856 23. Jun 19:24 10
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  846 23. Jun 20:05 11
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  840 23. Jun 20:51 12
| -rw------- 1 lee lee 1189 23. Jun 02:05 2
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  862 23. Jun 02:05 3
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  858 23. Jun 02:05 4
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  882 23. Jun 02:05 5
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  843 23. Jun 02:05 6
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  862 23. Jun 02:05 7
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  851 23. Jun 02:06 8
| -rw------- 1 lee lee  923 23. Jun 02:06 9
| -rw------- 1 lee lee 2163 23. Jun 20:51 .overview
`----


What's with "/home/lee/News/diary/diary/"? Is that a leftover from my
trying to get it to work?


[1]: http://www.linux-france.org/article/appli/emacs/bibliotheque/.gnus.el

     ((7 . day) (0 . day) (60 . minute) (15 . minute) (0 . minute))

     I'm not sure what it means, though. I'm guessing it means I should
     be reminded 7 days in advance of the date, then on the day of the
     date 60 minutes, 15 minutes and 0 minutes in advance of the date.