Re: Overbearing undownloaded face

[Harry Putnam <hgp@sbcglobal.net>]

Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> writes:

> Well, it's all in the eye of the beholder.  Several colors were tried
> before the group tired of seeing it changed or decided that they liked
> the green.  To be honest, I'm not sure which.

The actual color was never my complaint

[...]

>> Just at a quick thought, it seems the undownloaded face is more a
>> pain in the butt than a help.
>
> The agent isn't much use if you haven't downloaded an article.  If you
> use gnus-agent-fetch-session (J s) then the undownloaded face may not
> be much of a help.  However, if you like to pick and choose the
> articles to download, it helps with keeping track of your decisions.

I see the idea of the undownloaded face.  But it seems to be intruding
in an area where agent qualities are not called for.  Its over-riding
long time functionality developed before there was an agent.  Nulling
out options designed for news reading without the agent.  Like
different faces for read, dormant etc.  Those options (or at least
their faces) shouldn't disappear because the server is agentized.

> That will change the color.  If you want to completely remove the
> undownloaded face (and thereby restore the behavior that you're
> comfortable with), do the following.
>
> Customize gnus-summary-highlight.  Remove the three cons cells that
> reference the undownloaded faces.

Ok, now were talking.

> If you would prefer a text indicator, you can add the %O specification to
> gnus-summary-format-spec.

I'm thinking using format-spec  should be the default.  It wouldn't over-ride
existing faces or options for other styles of reading

> The agent was largely designed from the perspective of the nntp
> backend.  Since the retention times on many servers is fairly low, it
> really not safe to mark an article then expect it to still be
> available later.  However, if you fetch it into the agent, you can
> then mark it knowing that it will always be available.

Those very marks, and their faces were invented for precisely the
usage you say is unsafe.  Tick, dormant, read all were available long
before the agent came into being ..(around quassia-18 or so, I think).

The whole business of tieing tick to cache was around before the
agent.  But it wasn't felt necessary to force all other faces into
submission if a message was not cached.

[...]

> No, everything is customizable to the point that you can get back the
> exact non-agentized appearance.

Thats the beauty of gnus eh?  But still, it seems that undownloaded
face thing makes it hard to use the agent as it was designed to be
used.

That is, to allow both styles of reading in one tool.  Plugged and
unplugged.  In the current setup, features that are, strickly
speaking, only relevant to agentized messages are getting into the way
of `plugged' usage by overriding marks and their faces - in fact,
rendering them useless for Plugged reading.

Thanks for the info and aiming me at those three cons-cells.