Re: `gnus-refer-article-methods' and `gnus-summary-refer-thread'

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Fri Jul 22 2011, Andrew Cohen <cohen-AT-andy.bu.edu> wrote:

>>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
>
>     Dave> It's a bit curious that when I'm sitting on the root of a
>     Dave> thread, `A T' doesn't find the rest of it via nnir when I have
>     Dave> that in `gnus-refer-article-methods'.  
>
> `A T' (gnus-summary-refer-thread) doesn't use gnus-refer-article-methods
> at all. This is distinct from `^` (gnus-summary-refer-parent-article)
> which consults the entries in `gnus-refer-article-methods' in order
> until the parent is found.

Right.  Like I said in the part of my post you didn't cite, I think I
understand why it's that way, but it seems like a programming artifact
rather than a design decision.

> For nnimap groups `A T' searches /in the current group/ for any article
> that is referenced in the primary article, or refers to the primary
> article or any of its references. In rare cases where mailers have not
> properly coordinated references it is possible for this to miss
> articles, but it should be rare and avoiding it would require recursing
> searches which would be very slow.

I'm not trying to deal with the case of improperly-coordinated
references.  I delete/expire things from my INBOX but sometimes want to
get to the parent article of a message, which is certainly in my "All
Mail" group (cool, your nnir features make that work for me!) or
reconstruct the thread attached to a message (bummer, no dice).  These
seem—from a user's point-of-view—like highly similar operations, and I
don't see why the article searches shouldn't proceed through all the
same means.

> What it does /not/ do is search across multiple groups, and this is the
> most likely reason for not finding all articles within a thread.  

Yes, I'm aware that's why it's not finding the article.

> The current function adds the found articles from the current group
> into the summary buffer. Nnir creates an ephemeral group which can
> contain articles from multiple groups which is substantively
> different.

Yes, but when I use `^' it can use nnir to insert articles that don't
exist in the current group into the current group's summary
buffer... which would is substantively similar to what I'm asking for ;-)

> Having said that I am just about to check in a
> modification that will allow searching across multiple groups through
> the use of a prefix-arg or setting a variable. Rather than calling the
> current `gnus-summary-refer-thread' this will construct the same imap
> search pattern but use nnir to search across the entire server and
> create an ephemeral group with the results.

I'm not yet sure I understand what you're describing.

For Wanderlust I co-wrote some code that, given a message, will pop up
that message's whole thread (with the source message selected) in an
ephemeral group
<https://github.com/dabrahams/dwamacs/blob/master/site-lisp/wl-conversation.el>.
That was very useful to me and would be happy to use something just like
that instead of the current `A T' functionality, if that's what you're
proposing.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com