Re: Partial article download

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:
>
>> Do you know that the text/plain part is always the first part
>> of a message?  Wouldn't it be better to just pull down all text/plain
>> parts of a message?
>
> Hm.  Yes... when requesting the headers on group entry, I can also ask for
> the article structure.  So when it comes time to request the article, it
> should be easy enough to ask for all the text/plain parts.  Or perhaps all
> text/* parts?  Well, that can be user-configurable.

Generally, I would expect all you to fetch all the structural (multipart/*)
and inline (*/*) parts, other than the ones that were not going to be
displayed because they were the lower priority part of a multipart/alternative
chunk of main.  OTOH ...

>> But whatever way you do it, partial downloading should cooperate nicely
>> with the agent.
>
> If we have a "fetch complete article" message, it could just bind the agent
> thing to nil and then request it straight from the IMAP server?  Then things
> should Just Work.  That is, the partial articles would be downloaded by the
> agent and stored.

... I very strongly favour this being an "implementation detail" that I have
absolutely no visibility of as an end user.  (Well, save for offline operation
or whatever.)

Way back when I vaguely thought about this I envisioned rewriting the MIME
bits so the interface between the backend and the rest of Gnus was based on
fetching the MIME structure, then fetching individual parts while rendering.

That would allow the IMAP implementation to delegate that to the server, but
the NNTP (etc) implementation to use a common function that basically emulated
the same stuff on top of the entire article.

        Daniel

I never wrote working code, though, so I don't know it counts.
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✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel@rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
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