Re: nnml/nnfolder marks faster

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> It seems that marks, seen, recent, et all has introduced quite a few
> problems. For me it has been problems that seem to have solved themselves at
> least temporarily.
>
> Probably heresy but I'm wondering if the value of these things is so
> great as to merit not just dropping it as a nice idea but not that
> workable.

If noone feel these changes serve any purpose, I guess we could back
them out.  But if someone finds them useful, maybe it is nice to keep
it and isolate any possible problems.

Most features have problems in the beginning, and we are talking about
several new features here -- seen, recent, self-contained nnml and
self-contained nnfolder are four separate features, with their own
separate set of bugs.  Thinking of them as one new feature is not
fair, I think.

> My understanding is that this started as a way to allow for backing up
> readedness marks easily.  For my usage that is not now nor has it ever
> been a big issue.  When I've had occasion to lose readedness marks it
> has never been a major calamity.  Usually I can reconstruct close
> enough without too much trouble, or just start over.
>
> How serious of a problem is it to simply start over with the marks?
> About the only ones that has immediate effects is the persistent,
> dormant and tick mark, which depending on setting might mean a bunch
> of stuff gets uncached and deleted or unmarked and deleted.  And of
> course this could happen anyway, even with the new files in place.
> Like maybe a random rogue M-c in group buffer.
>
> I've used a backup system *outside* gnus for a long time.  It does not
> backup marks but it does backup messages which is far more important.
> It seem to me that marks are really not a core need.  That is, nothing
> really bad happens if you loose them.

Marks in nnml and nnfolder had this goal, yes.  It sounds as if you
don't need the feature, and modulo bugs the absence or presence of the
feature shouldn't matter then.

The seen and recent marks had different goals though.

> It seems further that the things that do represent significant effort
> to reconstruct are still no better than ever. That is, the stuff in 
> `G p' settings still resides in .newsrc.eld and is therefore no more
> backupable than it ever was.

Right, I think we could get to that as well, in time.