Re: deleting messages in nndoc?

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Paul Stodghill <stodghil@CS.Cornell.EDU> writes:

> Has anyone put together a patch to GNUS that allows messages to be deleted
> from nndoc files?

The main reason that nndoc can't delete messages is that nndoc isn't
supposed to alter the contents of the documents it reads.  Since it
can't add new headers to keep an article-to-number mapping consistant,
articles won't have consistent article numbers if we allow article
deletion.

However, this is only important for solid nndoc groups.  There's
really no reason why nndoc shouldn't be able to edit ephemeral nndoc
groups, since the article-to-number mapping is rather up in the air in
any case.

So, deletion is (in principle) possible, although it would take rather
a lot of programming to make nndoc able to do that stuff.  Each and
every document format would need its own message deletion/insertion
function, which can get rather hairy in some cases.

So I don't really think it's worth it.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen