Dynamic stuff (was: Mailing list and Gcc header in nnimap groups)

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

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:

> Safer, but effective less often, due to mailing list trailers, etc.

Which reminds me of an idea I've had now for, er, 30 seconds.  Which
probably means that it's somebody else's idea I've just remembered.

In the Gnus universe, there are two kinds of information.  There's
static information (protocols, etc) and dynamic information (the
layout of slashdot).  These two kinds of information are squished
together in the Gnus source, requiring using the CVS Gnus if you want
thinks like nnslashdot to work more than a couple of weeks to work.

Wouldn't it be nice if it was possible to put the nnslashdot parsing
thingie somewhere outside the source so that it could be downloaded
separately?

(Now I remember.  This really is somebody else's idea.)

However, parsing slashdot is more or less bound to involve Lisp code,
which means that you can't fetch it from an untrusted source, which
(again) means that it might as well just remain in CVS.

Mailing list trailers, on the other hand, don't have to remain there.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a collaborative source of mailing
list trailers that told mail- and news readers how to filter them
away?

Just imagine.  A world without mailing list trailers.

Sounds beautiful, doesn't it?

And since that would be just a file full of regexps -- "if the headers
match this regexp, then filter out this regexp from the body" -- then
it would be safe to update that list (semi-)automatically for users.
wget -o /usr/share/gnus/trailers.txt http://www.gnus.org/trailers.txt
in cron.

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