Re: Cache/Agent unification

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

>>> The idea sounds good to me.  But I'd like to think Agent as the
>>> second level cache instead of Agent/Cache unification.  Cache and
>>> Agent is for different purposes.
>>
>> Which different purposes?
>
> The cache already conflates two separate functions -- persistent
> articles and, er, the cache.  I think that Simon is right in that the
> second of these functions should be conflated with the Agent instead.

Ah, formulated like that, it is much clearer.  Keeping persistant
articles in the ~/News/cache/ directory and moving cached articles
into ~/News/agent/ seems like a good approach.

Christoph, would you be happy with that?  (I belive you took backups
of your cache but not the agent, presumably because you use the
persistant article feature of the cache and not the cache itself?)

Hm.  Maybe there still is a gap though -- cached articles (not
persistant ones) are kept around (and shown in summary buffers) even
when they have expired on the server, if `gnus-cache-remove-articles'
is nil (or something).  But this is probably a bug.  A cache should
cache things, not change semantics.  Those who rely on that behaviour
could use persistant articles instead, I think.