Re: [Q] primary / secondary methods differences

[Didier Verna <didier@lrde.epita.fr>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) wrote:

> On 22 May 2001, Didier Verna wrote:
> 
> > Implementing `gnus-select-methods' while maintaining backward
> > compatibility doesn't look too difficult to me. I'm more sceptical
> > on the latter point though.
> 
> How should it deal with the prefix/no prefix problem?  Maybe it's a
> good thing to always have a prefix for the group names, but if you
> treat the first entry in gnus-select-methods differently, you're back
> to square one.

        Yup. Actually, I don't find the primary group dynamic selection
useful. At least, not if we provide a more general server selection scheme at
startup (I don't see how one would find that skiping the prefix is an
obsolutely necessary feature...).

        As far as backward compatibility is concerned, what we could do if
make gnus accept a nil primary method, and then use
`gnus-secondary-select-methods' as my `gnus-select-methods' variable. Then, we
could have a `gnus-select' function understanding the numeric prefix
convention, but also letting you choose the methods you want to enable at
startup.

        The important idea is to separate the notions of selection by level /
selection by server.

-- 
Didier Verna, didier@lrde.epita.fr, http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier

EPITA / LRDE, 14-16 rue Voltaire   Tel.+33 (1) 53 14 59 47
94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France   Fax.+33 (1) 44 08 01 99   didier@xemacs.org