Re: gnus-sync work

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Mon Mar 07 2016, Ted Zlatanov <tzz-AT-lifelogs.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 23:28:16 +0200 Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote: 
>
> SB> I've given up on the couchdb route, all that happens when trying to
> SB> initialize couchdb 1.4.0 is that I'm getting strange error messages,
> SB> like e.g. a 404 on /sb/_design/lesync (my base is named "sb" and not
> SB> "tzz"), and /var/couchdb/couchdb.log fils up with JSON dumps with error
> SB> messages I don't understand.
>
> Yeah... I haven't used this in years and CouchDB has not been a fun
> environment. It was a mistake for me to rely on it.
>
> Lars had agreed to use IMAP as the sync backend and started work on
> that, but I don't know the current status (I ask this question once a
> year, sorry). The ultimate goal is to host the newsrc.eld entirely
> inside IMAP. My work with Tramp to support file access over IMAP (now
> removed because it was not used by anyone) could have been part of that,
> but clearly an atomic file would not work, we need to break out the
> records for each group so they can be updated independently.
>
> Using the Gnus slave code seems clever but would be a mistake, I think
> (because the assumption with Gnus slaves is that a master will
> eventually come along and gather the dribble files). Another way of
> looking at it is that Gnus needs to be in perpetual slave mode, there
> should be no master.
>
> In a modern environment, I think there are many choices for distributed
> databases but I think IMAP remains the best way to synchronize data
> across multiple news readers even though it's a terrible data protocol.
> Partly that's because it already synchronizes mail through article
> marks. But I'm not sure, honestly.

I wonder how ridiculous it would be to, for every newsgroup, create imap
folders with empty shadow articles for each news article?  Then you
could access NNTP and IMAP in parallel and just use IMAP for the article
marks.

Insane?

-- 
-Dave