Re: Patch Series: Warping via the registry

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Mon Oct 10 2011, Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun 09 Oct 2011, Dave Abrahams wrote:
>
>> This patch series implements the ability to warp to a message via
>> information stored in the Gnus registry.  From a user's point-of-view,
>> this means that articles brought in from other groups by
>> gnus-*-refer-* can be used as a jumping-off-point for further
>> references.
>
> You have invented yet another term to confuse gnus users in this patch
> series, but have not defined what "warp" means.

If you're complaining about the term "warp," I didn't invent it (and
probably wouldn't have thought of a term that cute).

,----[ (info "(gnus)Basic Usage") ]
|    The `nnir' group made in this way is an `ephemeral' group, and some
| changes are not permanent: aside from reading, moving, and deleting,
| you can't act on the original article. But there is an alternative: you
| can _warp_ to the original group for the article on the current line
| with `A W', aka `gnus-warp-to-article'. Even better, the function
| `gnus-summary-refer-thread', bound by default in summary buffers to `A
| T', will first warp to the original group before it works its magic and
| includes all the articles in the thread. From here you can read, move
| and delete articles, but also copy them, alter article marks, whatever.
| Go nuts.
`----

> Please add some documentation to explain the use of this new feature. If
> you can do so *without* defining new terminology, all the better.

I can do some explaining here, but I'm afraid it wouldn't fit into the
manual as is.  I hope this will be helpful.

Warping is admittedly a little obscure.  The reasons are:

- Warping is probably not too useful on its own.  Gnus uses it as part
  of the refer-article machinery when doing `A T', `A R', and `^'.  The
  idea, I think, is that if you have a group with an article that came
  from somewhere else, the rest of the thread is probably there, too.
  (Note: this is just my best understanding of it having crawled through
  the docs) So when you want to go to, say, the parent of an article,
  it's a good idea to be in that article's original thread.

- Before this patch series, the warp functionality was only available
  from nnir groups, so unless you were an nnir user with
  `gnus-refer-thread-use-nnir' enabled you might not have ever
  encountered it.

This patch series makes it possible to initiate a warp from any group,
which in turn makes it possible to follow threads starting from
ephemeral groups other than an nnir group.

Why would you want to do that?  The `gnus-goto-article' function I
posted in the series' introductory email allows me, given just a
Message-ID, to jump into a buffer containing that message, regardless of
which group or server the message came from (set up
gnus-refer-article-method to enable that).  That's awesomely powerful,
but without the patch series, I can't get from that article to its
entire thread.  With the patch series, I can, because gnus will warp me
to the group from which gnus-summary-refer-article plucked it.

If you want to know why I want to fetch articles by Message-ID in the
first place, it's because I store references to them in Org files, and
need to be able to jump from the Org item to the message.

HTH,

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