OffGnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

It was suggested that it might be nice to be able to read news
"offline" with Gnus.  Currently, we three ways of reading news (and
mail) on a machine that's not really connected to the net:

1)  inn+suck (or whatever) and pop.  That is, we set things up
properly and let other programs deal with how to shuffle things
to/from the net.

2)  Using the cache.  This doesn't really work as well as it should,
since Gnus insists on trying to connect to the real server even most
of the articles are present in the cache.

3)  nnsoup.  Using soup is quite fiddly, but it basically seems to
work.  Shuffling the packages from/to the net is a pain, though.

Yesterday I had someone give me a demonstration of (Free) Agent.
While I didn't really like it very much, it seems to have a quite nice
approach to "offline"-ness.  It basically fetches all the headers to
the groups, and then you can manually say which article bodies to
fetch, or have the newsreader fetch things automatically.  Not very
advanced, but it seems to be quite nice.

So -- I propose writing a new backend for Gnus provide similar
functionality.  I don't know what to call it (nnoff?  nnoffline?  I
don't really like the word "offline".), but I'm sure that someone will
come up with a good name.  Right?

Describing what the backend should do seems kinda difficult, so
perhaps I should just write it instead.  :-)  It has to know how to
get news from the "real" server, and it has to store headers and
article bodies locally.  (I originally thought I could just use the
cache for this, but it would complicate things.)  Like the mail
backends, it has to be able to expire old news, and it has to be able
to heed Supersedes/Cancel (if wanted).  I'm wondering whether to use
some database thingie, or to just use active/nov things, like in the
cache.  There has to be a special "outbox" where outgoing news is
stored, and people should be able to edit/not send things in the
outbox.  (Perhaps nndraft should make a comeback?)  

To control which articles to automatically fetch from which groups
(using scoring, etc) we can use group/topic parameters.  

Uhm, ah...  Even though this won't be trivial, I don't think it will
be all that much work.  And I think it will be useful.  As more and
more people move to modem-connected Linux/Windoze boxes, "offline"
newsreaders get more useful, not less...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@ifi.uio.no * Lars Ingebrigtsen