Re: Attaching notes to messages

[Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

| Editing is also possibe in News groups with  `C-u e'

Hmm, what exactly happens in this case?  Does the article get saved
to a local disk like in the case of marking it persistent?

| I have code pieced together with help from Kai and Lars (the
| botchiness is all mine) That allows the user to save an edited message
| from  any gnus editing mode to any group with a few key strokes. And
| leaves the original in place untouched.
| 
| It also allows a way to do this:
| 
| Press "F" or "R" on a message you wish to keep and annotate
| 
| Type in your annotation between [] or similar, then save that portion
| to file with M-x save-to-file.
| 
| Remove the annotation with C-w then attach it with 'C-c a'

Are these SAVE-TO-FILE and `C-c a' things part of your code?  I
can't see the connection and, on the other hand, they are not
default stuff.

| Save the Message plus attachment (to desired group) with the code I
| mentioned above then kill the edit buffer.
| 
| The result of all this is an annotation attached to a copy of original
| message, saved in a special group.  While leaving the original message
| untouched in its group.

As far as I can see, this doesn't provide any way to get to the
annotation from the message...

| I'll post the code on a web site or here if you'd like to see if its
| useful to you.

...so I don't think so.  What you suggested first and what Jonas
Steverund also suggested, i.e. editing the message and adding some
`X-Gnus-Annotation: foob' line, might be considerable, but first I
want to know what happens to by-force -edited news articles.
Although it still feels a bit hacky, I think this sounds the best
way to go at least if I manage to wrap up some functions to ease
using it.  Oh well, one can't get everything.

-- Warning! Dont continue further; what follows is just
   venting of my manic-depressive mind

What I really would like to do is to write a annotated-article
mixin class for article class and put slots for it for special
information and one for arbitrary text and be done with it (well,
of course I'd have add method to article display protocol too to
make Gnus display notes on a separate window along the actual
article and perhaps to printing protocol to make Gnus print these
annotations with the article).  I would not have to take care of
ugly saving details based on whether some backend by default stores
the actual article content on the local disk or somewhere else;
article objects would just end up to a PLOB!-like object database,
along with the article text or just a reference to nntp or imap
server.

But oooh no, I'm stuck to this freaking alternative reality that
somehow splitted up somewhere in the '80s and everything just
started going backwards.  I'm stuck to this pale shade of Lisp OS
called Emacs based on this &/%¤# Elisp and C running on top of this
everything-is-text Unix-lookalike, kept together with chewing-gum
and Perl (that looks like cat's vomit and leads to even more
disgusting chewing-gum-and-Perl software).  On this Emacs I run
Gnus that I need to turn upside down every time I want to even
consider adding some small extension, and in this case all I would
get is a text file, at the corner of some stupid filesystem with
close to zero accessibility on different machines I use, with no
semantic content and associations to my other personal information
anyway.  "Fortunately" I don't have time to do Gnus hacking right
now as after about 7h sleep I need to wake up to write AI code that
I eventually need to translate from CL to C++, which is a
requirement on our course.  Not to mention that for the evening
I've scheduled myself to write Java for a course whose lecturer
looks world through C++/Java-glasses and preaches about design
patterns that really are just a service pack to get around C++'s
limitations, just like there are oodles of services packs and small
tune-this-and-that utils to give a feeling that one has momentarily
got around the brokeness of MS' software.  At some point this whole
tower of crap will collapse and I want to be somewhere else then.

*phew*.  Did I mention that I need a holiday? :)

-- 
Hannu
(loop (luuk |Pink Floyd|:|Sorrow| :loud t))