From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/68498 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: David Engster Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Abandoning the concept of groups as a storage medium? Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:56:39 +0200 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1240909056 18143 80.91.229.12 (28 Apr 2009 08:57:36 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:57:36 +0000 (UTC) To: ding@gnus.org Original-X-From: ding-owner+M16932@lists.math.uh.edu Tue Apr 28 10:57:27 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: ding-account@gmane.org Original-Received: from util0.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.18]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Lyj82-0005ci-Ma for ding-account@gmane.org; Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:57:26 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.math.uh.edu) by util0.math.uh.edu with smtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1Lyj7X-0004v7-H7; Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:56:55 -0500 Original-Received: from mx2.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.33]) by util0.math.uh.edu with esmtps (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1Lyj7V-0004uh-AQ for ding@lists.math.uh.edu; Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:56:53 -0500 Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.231.51]) by mx2.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Lyj7O-0003jK-SZ for ding@lists.math.uh.edu; Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:56:53 -0500 Original-Received: from m61s02.vlinux.de ([83.151.21.164]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 1Lyj7p-0006VN-00 for ; Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:57:13 +0200 Original-Received: from [134.76.4.218] (helo=Macintosh.local) by m61s02.vlinux.de with esmtpsa (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1:16) (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Lyj7N-00007i-Df for ding@gnus.org; Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:56:45 +0200 In-Reply-To: (Jan Rychter's message of "Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:05:09 +0200") User-Agent: Gnus/5.110011 (No Gnus v0.11) Emacs/23.0.92 (darwin) Mail-Copies-To: never Mail-Followup-To: ding@gnus.org X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) List-ID: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:68498 Archived-At: Jan Rychter 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