To Quassia or not to Quassia...

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

To Quassia!

I haven't got any free time on my hands, so I started Quassia Gnus
today.  I don't think I'll be releasing it before dong a couple more
Gnus 5.4 iterations, though.

I've been hacking up the Gnus offline support today, and I've got it
basically working.  There's just a lot of additional typing required
to get a nice user interface to it.

It basically works as follows:

1) When "online", Gnus just does its normal thaaang.  gnus-agent
provides some additional minor modes that will let users mark articles
for downloading in a gazillion ways (marking groups, marking articles,
marking articles for downloading of headers only, group/topic
parameters for downloading strategies, etc, etc) and a command for
starting the downloading.  I've currently just implemented a simple
"download all unread articles in this group" thing.

2) When "offline", all groups that belong to select methods that are
agentized will be handled by nnagent.  (The backend interface commands
are just intercepted.)  nnagent is simply nnml under a different name
-- for the first time since writing the nnoo thingie, I used it for
something non-trivial, and it actually works!  Golly!  nnagent is
just 2k long, and of that there's 1k comments.  :-)

In addition, there'll have to be some commands for doing maintenance
and stuff.  nndraft will have to be reintroduced to again, and will
have to be given steroids.

Let's see...  Crossposting works; I'll have to write code for
Supersedes and Cancel; I think I'll forget about the Expires header.
Uhm -- oh!  I have to add active/newsgroups files.  And other stuff.
But it's rather straightforward.

It would be nice to have the downloading performed asynchronously, but
I don't think I'll tackle that as this stage.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen