Intelligent handling of interrupted communication

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Due to a bug on the newsserver here, articles are often being posted
for very long times -- say, half an hour.  Luckily, this condition is
handled when I press C-g after a few sedonds; the article still gets
posted to whatever group.  However, it is impossible to access the
newsserver afterwards (e.g. read another article) -- I have to
evaluate (nntp-close-server) manually after the C-g.  This is all
bearable -- after all, tin provides you with no exit but C-z + kill +
restart in that situation.

However, the latest slrn release, when I press C-g in the very same
situation, I get an "Error writing to server" error, and the following 
query in the minibuffer:

  Select one: R-epost, E-dit, C-ancel[1]

Personally, this is most cool.  With Gnus, C-g gives me just `Edit'.
Furthermore, the `Cancel' choice correctly handles reconnecting to the 
newsserver (no need for the equivalent of `M-: (nntp-close-server) RET'.


Aside from my very specific situation, I can think of a number of
cases where intelligent handling of interrupted communication with the
news server would come in very handy.  Since this is Emacs, all it
would take is an intelligent `quit' condition-case catcher.

Would it be consider useful enough for Gnus?  Would it be possible to
implement cleanly, given the current abstraction model?



[1]
Note: `Cancel' here has nothing to do with article canceling.

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
"Psychos _do not_ explode when sunlight hits them."