Re: I can haz cloud idea

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

Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:

> On my home machine, I read lots of nntp groups, which I never want to
> read on other machines, so syncing that data is inefficient and risks
> data loss if the remote machine updates the .newsrc.eld after I've
> done some reading on the local machine.

And the same goes for nnml/nnfolder groups, which would be useless to
sync.  So some sort of control would be necessary here to determine what
parts of the .newsrc.eld data to share.

> Similarly, I don't want my imap groups synced, since imap already
> handles that.  Syncing this too would be inefficient and risk data loss.

Well, yes and no.  The .newsrc.eld file keeps track of sequence numbers
(in the QRESYNC case) and max seen articles (in the non-QRESYNC) case.
Syncing with an IMAP server involves a lot of network traffic, and the
longer since you've synced, the more data has to be transferred.

There's a large data gain to be had by syncing the .newsrc.eld data for
nnimap groups too, I think.

>> As for the "merging different views" -- that's not going to happen in
>> any meaningful way.  If you're reading stuff offline on two different
>> machines (without ever going online), one client is going to win when
>> you're finally going online.
>
> If instead of diffs you upload actions like "(mark-read 12 (34 . 37) 44)"
> then you get lots of advantages:
>
> - very small amount of data to upload:  a diff would include the old
>   data, all the marks that didn't change, and context lines 
> - diffs are fragile, as they might not apply cleanly if things get
>   out of sync
> - this method automatically handles merging to some degree, as instead
>   of uploading all marks for a group it only sends the changes

Yes, I think that's what I meant by "diffs".  :-)  But what I meant was
that if you mark an article as unread in one Gnus, and then read in
another, without going online, one of them is going to win when you
finally go online.  For that particular article.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/