Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Raymond Scholz]

Hi!

I'd like to see a feature that synchronises two or more Gnusae in a
way that keeps track of read articles (mail & news).  The user should
be able to save points of synchronisation (probably lists of message
ids¹) and be able to load these sync files from within Gnus again.

Scenario: Its March, 04 and Joe Dohn is reading news at his home
PC. That evening, he is going to prepare for a travel, thus writing a
sync point "000304-home.sync" with all messages read since last² sync
at his PC.  Joe puts this file on his laptop and lets Gnus read it.
All messages that are listed in the sync file should now be marked as
read (i.e. not listed in the summary buffer) on entering the
respective groups.  As Gnus is synchronised now, it should start a
fresh internal list of read messages (initially empty).  On his
travel, Joe is getting and reading new news with his laptop.
Returning on March, 07, Joe writes a new sync file
"000307-laptop.sync" containing all read messages from last sync up to
now.  After transmission of that file onto his home PC, Joe reads it
with Gnus and his home Gnus is in sync with the Gnus on his laptop.
If he is getting new messages now, all messages that are listed in the
last sync file are marked as read (on entering the summary buffer).

Bad idea?  Unimplementable?  Major design flaws?  Can this already be
done with some weird scoring stuff?
_____
¹No matter if unique or not :), just a list like ~/.nnmail-cache
²Rendering the question: how to start this at all? Maybe putting a
 (gnus-synchronize) like (gnus-agentize) and looking after the file
 that internally records the read messages.  If missing, create it.

Cheers,
  Ray
-- 
Raymond Scholz - rscholz@zonix.de - PGP - http://www.zonix.de/

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Kai Großjohann]

Do slave Gnusae do the job?  I'm not sure if they do what you want.
kai
-- 
Be indiscrete.  Do it continuously.

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Raymond Scholz]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Do slave Gnusae do the job?  I'm not sure if they do what you want.

Uh, nice.  And very close to my idea.

Maybe I forgot to stress the point that both Gnusae do not read from
the same servers, may have different subscribed groups and may not
even belong to the same user and thus share a common $HOME.

Looks like the Slave Gnusae feature uses article numbers to uniquely
identify messages.  So if this could be extended to consider
message-ids instead, would that be what I'm looking for?  I think so.

Cheers,
  Ray
-- 
Raymond Scholz - rscholz@zonix.de - PGP - http://www.zonix.de/

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Kai Großjohann]

On 04 Mar 2001, Raymond Scholz wrote:

> Looks like the Slave Gnusae feature uses article numbers to uniquely
> identify messages.  So if this could be extended to consider
> message-ids instead, would that be what I'm looking for?  I think
> so.

Yes, maybe.  But it's not easy.  Gnus uses article numbers to identify
messages, like, EVERYWHERE.  So it's not at all easy to transition to
article numbers.

Also, note that with article numbers, it's sufficient to change
"1-1000" to "1-2000" (in ~/.newsrc) to indicate that you've read 1000
more messages.  With message ids, that's not so simple...

kai
-- 
Be indiscrete.  Do it continuously.

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Kai Großjohann]

If both Gnusae talk to the same news server, then taking ~/.newsrc*
and ~/News (and ~/Mail and ~/.nnmail-cache if you like) with you ought
to do the trick.
kai
-- 
Be indiscrete.  Do it continuously.

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Simon Josefsson]

Raymond Scholz <ray-2001@zonix.de> writes:

> Scenario: Its March, 04 and Joe Dohn is reading news at his home
...
> last sync file are marked as read (on entering the summary buffer).

Storing mail on a IMAP server and using Gnus Agent might work too.  I
have a few Gnus installation talking to the same server, and I could
use the Agent if I were to travel somewhere without Internet
connectivity.  Some features are lacking in the Agent though (like
moving articles between folders offline).

Also, you could use whatever client is available, in case you don't
want to travel with your Gnus, to access your mail.

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Dan Christensen]

Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> writes:

> Storing mail on a IMAP server and using Gnus Agent might work too. 

Will this be manageable for large collections of e-mail messages,
e.g. 300 groups containing about 100 megabytes?  In other words, can I
put my entire archive of e-mail into an IMAP server on machine A, then
slurp it all into the agent on machine B, and then have access to the
e-mail on either machine with the ability to sync this when machine B
is connected to the net?  Or will it be horribly slow?

-- 
Dan Christensen
jdc+news@uwo.ca

Re: Feature suggestion: Synchronise Gnusae

[Simon Josefsson]

Dan Christensen <jdc+news@uwo.ca> writes:

> > Storing mail on a IMAP server and using Gnus Agent might work too. 
> 
> Will this be manageable for large collections of e-mail messages,
> e.g. 300 groups containing about 100 megabytes?  In other words, can I
> put my entire archive of e-mail into an IMAP server on machine A, then
> slurp it all into the agent on machine B, and then have access to the
> e-mail on either machine with the ability to sync this when machine B
> is connected to the net?  Or will it be horribly slow?

The first sync will of course be quite slow, but after that I think it
should be OK.  My main IMAP spool is around 700MB, but I'm not using
the agent (all my machines are connected to internet).  The Agent
isn't streamlined for IMAP users though (it's hardcoded that read
articles aren't downloaded, and some other things) so you'll probably
need some tinkering with it to make it really useful.

(I've got some patches for this, but it changes the default behaviour
of Agent and breaks backwards compatibility so I haven't commited
them.)