Re: What is happening in agentized groups?

[Christoph Rohland <cr@sap.com>]

Hi Simon,

On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> The Agent has a hard coded behaviour not to download read articles.
> There was a patch that added a new predicate `read' and changed the
> default predicate from short into (and (not read) short) but I
> couldn't find a way to make it backwards compatible so I hesitated
> about commiting it.

I loved that feature (but it corrupted my agent files :-() and I would
still like to see it included.

> Do you read anything before downloading it into the Agent?  Then the
> read articles shouldn't be downloaded.  Maybe this has changed, but
> I don't think so (but I haven't really used the agent much for a
> while).

Actually I would like to be able to have such an article put into the
agent automatically, so I would be able to read it later without
refetching. 

AFAIU this would be against the agents design and that's what the
cache is for. But from a user perspective this distinction is
unintuitive. I would prefer a unified agent/cache where the cached
articles are agentised articles without being expired.

Greetings
		Christoph