Re: Song of Programming

[Robert Epprecht <epprecht@sunweb.ch>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
>
> > The fact that gnus-agent looses track of agentized posts once they are
> > expunged from the server is a singularly annoying aspect of gnus, for
> > us offliners.
>
> Yup.  Fix in Pterodactyl Gnus v0.91.

Wow! Thank you Lars, that's a bit like christmas for me...

So now there's only one thing left, to make the agent a *very*
handy offline tool: a better interface to the download score rules.

It would be very convenient if you could say 'I like this thread,
author or whatever, please download all the articles' Having to
edit a score file by hand or marking each single posting is a bit
too complicated. On the other hand we have this very good interface
to the other score files. So why not use the normal scoring rules
for downloading? This very likely wouldn't be too much work to
implement. Or have gnus-agent-use-normal-scoring-for-download
or something like that to swich it on or off?
Of course it wouldn't make sense to score on the body, so maybe
the agent should ignore this or warn, if someone tries to do so?

Another solution would be to do something like having the scoring
interface understand the 'symbolic prefix', and let there be values
like 'a' for all-score-rules or 'd' for download-score-rules.
So you could say something like 'M-i d I a s p' or so to change the
agents download score rules.

Anyway, a handy interface to the download score rules would be a very
substantial improvement of the agents abilities.

Robert Epprecht