Re: [patch] gnus agent

[Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> I'd like to try this out but I'm not real clear what to expect.
> What does this mean in practice?  (`filtered only by predicates') No
> agent score involved?  Still requires marking with % if read?

The patch does two things:

. Make sure all articles are eligible for agent download, see below.

. Introduce a new predicate `read' to match read mail.  Replacing your
current Agent predicates with

        (and (not read)
                <yourearlierpredicate>)

should make things the same as it was before.  The default predicate
has been changed, so if you didn't define any categories, there should
be no change at all (except for new features).

I'm not sure this should be commited to Gnus 5.8 since it alter the
current behaviour, even though it make it consistent with
documentation.  The current `bug' is probably more of a `feature', I
think.

The documentation for categories below, note the "...every available
articles...".  Earlier this just wasn't true, only UNREAD articles
(having article numbers larger than the highest already downloaded
article) was eligible for agent scoring/predicate rules.

Category Syntax
...............

   A category consists of two things.

  1. A predicate which (generally) gives a rough outline of which
     articles are eligible for downloading; and

  2. a score rule which (generally) gives you a finer granularity when
     deciding what articles to download.  (Note that this "download
     score" is not necessarily related to normal scores.)

   A predicate in its simplest form can be a single predicate such as
`true' or `false'.  These two will download every available article or
nothing respectively.  In the case of these two special predicates an
additional score rule is superfluous.