Re: agent/imap offline reading

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> The agent currently has some hard coded default to not download
>> already read articles.  I wrote a patch long time ago (posted here)
>> that added a `read' Agent predicate to fix this, but that isn't
>> backwards compatible and means everyone has to change agent
>> predicates, which isn't good, so I'm not sure if it can be added.
>
> Can it be made backwards-compatible?  Can't you make it so that by
> default, read articles are not downloaded, like now?  Then people can
> frob their agent predicates to also download read articles.

The default value is stored in the agent predicate file, so if we
change the default the old default will still be in people's agent
predicate file.  So people with old agent predicate files that upgrade
to new gnus will start to download read articles.  The upgrade
procedure could contain a step that wraps all old predicates in a (and
read ,@OLD) but it isn't nice to do that without telling the user.
And what if the user later downgrades?  I'm not sure what Gnus does
given an unknown predicate.

But I guess it isn't impossible to fix.