Re: building a smarter gnus

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Wes Hardaker <wes@hardakers.net> wrote:
> You know, I searched for "backend" in the manual and didn't see
> anything so just copied an example.  I now see I should have
> searched for "back end".  Sigh.

The manual used to say "backend", but it was changed at RMS's request.
Feel free to let him know how much you appreciate it. :)

>> It should indeed be a separate function, I think.  That's the most
>> convenient way for the backend to express that it's capable of
>> handling ranges.

And while we're at it, we can make this new function return the
headers as a Lisp object instead of in the " *nntpd*" buffer.  nntp is
the only backend that *really* needs to parse all that text.  Backends
that determine their own NOV data storage format can choose a format
designed to work well with whatever Gnus<->backend interface we come
up with, so we might as well choose an interface that makes less work
for Gnus.

> Yeah, that seems sensible to me.  Now, who's going to implement the
> support for doing this :-)

I'll take a look at it after I finish some work on nnmaildir.

> But it's inefficient, in my opinion, to request an extremely large
> number of articles when only a few exist.

Efficiency is not a matter of opinion.  We can measure the speed of
each method.


paul