Re: Abandoning the concept of groups as a storage medium?

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

Jan Rychter <jan@rychter.com> writes:
> Then I discovered mairix and nnmairix. They are close to what I need,
> but there is the issue of flag propagation, which nnmairix doesn't do
> for an NNML spool.

I have fixed this. I'll send you a patch soon, but I want to test this a
bit further. nnml is tricky, because it can save marks in .newsrc.eld as
well as the .marks files.

However, mairix won't know anything about marks from nnml spools,
meaning you won't be able to search for ticked/read/replied
articles. This can only be fixed within mairix, but since I've never got
any reaction from the maintainer about the maildir patches, I'm not
terribly motivated to work on this feature.

[...]
> I want to be able to set flags and tags on *any* E-mail message
> *anywhere*, not just in the "real group it belongs to". I don't want
> my "groups" to have anything to do with the way my messages are
> stored. E-mail should be stored in a key/value store with metadata
> copied and indexed separately.
>
> The problem I see with Gnus is that it is designed around a central
> concept of a mail backend which exposes groups. 

Yes, but I don't see this as a restriction for what you would like to
have. Gnus can handle "dynamic" groups, where the contents changes all
the time, although it requires a lot of work to get right. As you say,
nnmairix comes pretty close, and it strictly works with the Gnus group
back end API. My main problem with maintaining nnmairix is that the back
ends behave differently, especially when it comes to marks and unread
count.

> The registry, if I understand correctly, is a workaround for some of
> the problems people encountered with this approach.
>
> Is there any way to achieve what I want with Gnus? Is anybody working on
> something of the kind? What would be the possible approaches?

We just had this discussion, and Ted raised some interesting points
regarding the registry and how it could be extended, and I agree with
him.

I think the registry should save all important headers of a message, and
maybe also some MIME information, like attachment names. Of course, as
Ted also said, this information can't be saved anymore in plain text
files like gnus.registry.eld, but needs some kind of external database
back end.

We could then add a back end which can create virtual groups based on
registry information. One could extend nnir to do that, but I'd vote for
creating a completely new one.

However, full text search is another matter entirely. This simply cannot
be done in Emacs Lisp.

-David