Re: `gnus-unseen-mark' everywhere

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> wrote:
>> The gnus-article-unpropagatable-p etc stuff should be moved into
>> nnml/nnfolder (perhaps nnmail) then, because we wouldn't want `seen'
>> marks to be stored in nnml .marks.
>
> Well, at least some things other than "seen" should probably be still
> dealt with as they are now.  E.g., "cache" really shouldn't be stored
> in any backend, because the information "cache" represents has nothing
> to do with what is stored in the backend.  We could add a new
> mechanism for handling "seen" (and others like it, if there are any).

Hm.  One could argue (as I probably did in our last discussion) that
the "seen" mark does not have to do with anything in the backend
either.

>> Hm, but this means the backends has knowledge about the semantics of
>> marks, which is wrong as well.
>
> Gnus could define a list of marks that are supposed to be per-user in
> shared groups; Gnus knows the semantics of the marks and thus knows
> which marks should be included.  (And users might have different ideas
> about what ought to be per-user, so this could even be defcustom'ed.)
> Backends could then DTRT with whichever marks are included in that
> variable, without knowing *why* they're in that variable.  Would that
> be any better?

I guess so, but it sounds like work.

Right now the dichotomy is between marks that belong in backends and
marks that doesn't belong there, and among the few marks that doesn't
belong in backends (seen cache download unsend score) only "seen" is
questionable.  Having a, erhm, trichotomy with marks that do not
belong in backends and per-user backend marks and global backend marks
would perhaps be more flexible but rather complex.