What to do next?

[Bruce Stephens <bruce@cenderis.demon.co.uk>]

I can't think of anything big like MIME, unless you count asynchronous
operation.  [Caveat, I haven't dared try the various asynchronous
settings, so maybe everything important has already been done.  I
doubt it, though.]  There are some largish minor things, though.

1. Some kind of calendar stuff (which probably requires coordinating
with whoever maintains calendar).  I ought to be able to snarf
vcalendar things from mail, and output things in vcalendar.
(Similarly for vcard and BBDB, of course.)

2. Support for MIME-based security.  I seem to remember there were
some issues with Gnus's MIME API and handling such that PGP/MIME, for
example, couldn't be easily hooked in.  This'll presumably also be the
case for S/MIME (and this is now an issue, since OpenSSL 0.9.5 is
supposed to be including simple S/MIME tools, so there'll be freely
available S/MIME stuff).  I think this should be fixed, so that we can
interoperate with people using lesser email clients.

3. Client-side annotating would be cool.  I'm not sure exactly what I
want, but attaching notes to messages, and dates (or maybe I mean
attaching email to places in my calendar?).  Not sure what this should
feel like.

4. Really clean text/enriched support.  I ought to be able to type a
message, using the menu to change text to bold/italic/etc., and when I
send it, Gnus should ask whether I really want to annoy people by
sending text/enriched.

It can transparently format the text anyway, to provide a
multipart/alternative with a text/plain (with bold marked with
asterisks and stuff) and a text/enriched.

I think this is much how Outlook Express does things, only it inflicts
text/html on people, and does the plain text badly.  (Having got
text/enriched, I guess Gnus could produce text/html quite easily,
too.)

I'm sure someone wrote a patch for this, but I don't see any evidence
of it, so it's obviously too well hidden for idiots like me to use.

5. Support for real databases.  (And Directories, I guess, although
LDAP's should probably be more of a BBDB thing.)  There ought to be a
backend designed for really large archives which can throw its data
into some real database.

Hmm, maybe the general support things (like the stuff that reads and
writes .newsrc.eld) could be abstracted such that I could replace it
with either db or an SQL database?  (Maybe it already is abstracted,
of course.)

More generally, although glimpse searching is good, for some things a
more structured search would be nice, so I could get a list of all
articles from some particular person, say, or a list of articles which
are followups to articles by some person.  Or something.  So it would
be cool if I could set Gnus up to automatically keep an SQL database
fed with suitable information (removing information about expired
articles, of course), and have some cool way of interrogating the
database.  (Actually, a cool way of interrogating SQL databases would
be useful in its own right.)


Hmm.  I think the MIME for security stuff and the text/enriched
support come highest on my list, and I think they're doable.  I'm not
sure about the others---they look a bit more vague, and maybe they
wouldn't work out.  If I had to vote, I'd vote for cleaning up the
MIME API such that it doesn't break signatures and can easily be used
by mailcrypt-like packages, and adding text/enriched support that's as
easy to abuse as Outlook Express's text/html.