Re: Request for opinions as to feasibility of a Gnus application.

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

I'm sorry I didn't respond to this sooner ...

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

> Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> writes:
> 
> > However, I'd like to give the users the means within Gnus to download
> > these large files to their local machines, if desired.  To do so, I'd
> > like to create a new decoding command within Gnus which, for any
> > selected articles, would create an asynchronous process which uses FTP
> > or HTTP or rsync or something similar (yet to be decided and possibly
> > even configurable at run time) to download the associated large files
> > to a user-specified location on the local machine.
> 
> I think I don't grok what you're trying to do, as you can see from the
> following stupid question: why don't you put a URL in the article and
> then use W3 to download the URL?

In the simple, one-file-at-a-time case, this would work.  I neglected
to mention in my original query that I also would like the user to be
able to mark a group of articles and to then cause them all to be
downloaded in a single batch.  This is why the decoding commands came
to mind.

Also, I'd like for the downloading to take place asynchronously from
the client Gnus session, so that the downloading of the file or files
could take place simultaneously while the user is using Gnus for other
purposes.

> You'd have to frob browse-url.el a bit, of course, since it normally
> invokes W3 to _display_ the URL, rather than to _download_ it.
> Another idea would be to do M-x find-file-at-point RET on an ange-ftp
> file name.

I'm curious: could the W3 code or `find-file-at-point' via an ange
filename do the downloading asynchronously, so that the user could be
doing other things with Gnus while the probably-several-minute
download is taking place?  If so, perhaps one or the other of these
could be invoked within this proposed new decoding command ... ???

> Can you try to explain so that I can better understand what you're
> trying to achieve?

Have I clarified this better now?

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com