Re: Partial article download

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

Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> writes:

> Generally, I would expect all you to fetch all the structural (multipart/*)
> and inline (*/*) parts, other than the ones that were not going to be
> displayed because they were the lower priority part of a multipart/alternative
> chunk of main.

That sounds like work.  :-)

My guess is that this feature is only interesting for people with low
bandwidth (for instance, on a phone).  So even if they're getting
text/html rendered, they don't want the images that would normally be
displayed in the article (referred to with cid:).

So I think "just download text/*" is good enough.

>> If we have a "fetch complete article" message, it could just bind the agent
>> thing to nil and then request it straight from the IMAP server?  Then things
>> should Just Work.  That is, the partial articles would be downloaded by the
>> agent and stored.
>
> ... I very strongly favour this being an "implementation detail" that I have
> absolutely no visibility of as an end user.  (Well, save for offline operation
> or whatever.)

Well, it'll be a new command, so it'll be visible.

> Way back when I vaguely thought about this I envisioned rewriting the MIME
> bits so the interface between the backend and the rest of Gnus was based on
> fetching the MIME structure, then fetching individual parts while rendering.
>
> That would allow the IMAP implementation to delegate that to the server, but
> the NNTP (etc) implementation to use a common function that basically emulated
> the same stuff on top of the entire article.

I'm not sure how useful that would be.

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