Re: any partial or rudamentary documentation of new nnselect work somewhere?

[Andrew Cohen <cohen@bu.edu>]

Dear Harry (and others)

>>>>> "Harry" == Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

    Harry> I'd like to get my hands on some bit of docu for the new
    Harry> nnselect work that is being done... I realize it is not done
    Harry> and won't be for some time.

Actually, almost done :)

    Harry> But I need a start of some kind.  Such things as the search
    Harry> syntax and something explaining the basics of how the search
    Harry> terms need to work with many backends.  That is, some big
    Harry> picture explanations and possibly as many actual examples as
    Harry> anyone has time to write.

First, nnselect and the new universal search syntax are two different
things. The feature branch in git feature/gnus-select contains the
nnselect work but not the new search language. So if you check out this
branch you should be able to continue working with essentially no change
in anything: if all you are doing is searching that will work the same
way as before (it will use the nnselect backend behind the scenes but
shouldn't behave markedly differently from the way things behaved
earlier). It would be great if you could try this out and report any
bugs.

MAKE A BACKUP OF .newsrc.eld JUST IN CASE!

nnselect allows doing lots of other things as well, but you can worry
about those later once there is some documentation in place. Or you can
ask me and I can send you some recipes.

    Harry> Something as rough as some of the experts working on nnselect
    Harry> might save there test command lines off to a file ... even
    Harry> with no explanatory remarks and make that available
    Harry> somewhere.

That's easy---there are no special commands :) For basic search just "G
G" as usual. Or if you want to create a permanent search group (that is,
one that behaves like any other group but the selected articles are the
result of a search query) use "G g".

    Harry> I've followed the discussion to the best of my ability... but
    Harry> mostly its over my head.

    Harry> I would still like to do some testing and I suspect the work
    Harry> needs to have a few non-expert testers at some point to make
    Harry> sure the new work is usable to some of us dim wits too.

Definitely! First I would like to make sure nnselect isn't going to do
anything bad (not likely, but needs testing). This should be easy since
users don't need to learn anything new to test the basic structure.

Once that is working correctly we will merge in the universal search
language that Eric has developed. This will require users to change the
syntax of their searches and might have a bit of a learning curve (but
only a bit---the language is clear and simple so it shouldn't pose any
difficulties).

Best,
Andy