One single function for marking articles?

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

In an offline discussion between Kai Großjohann and myself, something
came up which I thought might be worth asking in the mailing list:

I'm looking for a single gnus function which looks more or less like
this:

  (gnus-generic-mark-article SERVER GROUP ARTICLE MARK)

It would put the specified MARK on the specified ARTICLE within the
specified GROUP on the specified back-end SERVER.  It would be
buffer-safe and thread-safe in the sense that it could be called from
within any gnus buffer and any context, and it would set the specified
mark without disturbing its current buffer or any of its context.

I haven't found anything like this within all the gnus functions I've
dug through, although it's quite possible that I could have missed
something.

The reason I want this is because I have a procedure that runs
asynchronously which, among other things, marks various articles in
various ways.  I'd like this asynchronous procedure to run properly
even if I'm interactivly using gnus in a different summary buffer than
the one which my asynchronous process is operating on.

An alternative use for this hypothetical function would be for my
asynchronous procedure to append calls of the function to the dribble
file, so that they could do their jobs the next time gnus processes
that file.  In this case, the function wouldn't need to be thread-safe
and buffer-safe.  The current info that gets written into the dribble
file that performs this sort of thing is so complex that I wouldn't
want to try to generate it myself ... my news and email are too
important to lose if I screw up!

Any thoughts or ideas?  Any hope that such a function already exists?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com