Re: Terminology

[Jonas Steverud <tvrud@bredband.net>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Jonas Steverud <tvrud@bredband.net> writes:
[...]
>> Suggested new terms/definitions:
>>  Visited: A article that the user has seen before; read, ticked,
>>           dormant, marked as expireable, ... (Other criteria?)
>
> I'm not sure we need to introduce more terms...  (But we could keep
> the term "visited" around for when we need a new class of read marks.)

The main idea was not to introduce new terms but rename old, confusing ones.

The name "visited" I got from the Emacs terminology of visited
files. A consistent terminology that I personally like. 

>>  Read: An article that has been marked as killed, ancient, read in the
>>        naïve sense; i.e. actually *read*, ... I.e. not ticked etc.
>
> There is a Gnus mark called "read".  If you tick an active article, it
> will become read automatically.  Same for if you mark an article as
> expired, etc.

OK, I didn't know ticked articles counted as read. Doesn't matter
much, remove "I.e. not ticked etc." from my text above. :-)

>>  Unvisted or Unread: Replaces Unseen which I find confusing - an
>>                      article that is killed and yanked from the
>>                      summary buffer is in my view unseen.
>
> "Unread" is not a proper Gnus mark.  It might help understanding if
> you think of "unread" as an implicit mark, i.e. one that holds if
> nothing else holds.  So an article can't be marked both expired and
> unread, as unread isn't a mark.  "unread" is just an absence of marks.
> Of course, the exception to that rule is the "unseen" mark.

I didn't talk of specific marks that Gnus keeps track of, I was more
concerned about the terminology - classifications of articles.

Previous mails has indicated that there are some confusion regarding
what we call an article - sometimes regardless of the actual marks of
it and sometimes the marks are considered - and I just tries to see if
we can do something about that confusion. Renaming some of the terms
might help.

>>  Unseen: (?) Articles that are unvisited but not shown in the summary
>>          buffer, usually expunged articles due to scoring.
>
> "unseen" is another Gnus mark,

I didn't know that. Makes things a little more complicated then.

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