Re: Getting articles asynchronously.....

[Patrick Audley <paudley@portal.ca>]

>>>>> "Rat" == Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
>>>>> "PA" == Patrick Audley <paudley@portal.ca> writes:

Rat> That is an exceedingly bad plan in large newsgroups or groups
Rat> with large articles, such as source or binaries newsgroups.
Rat> Emacs will run out of memory before it's finished pre-fetching.

	No, No...  I didn't mean that Gnus should fetch articles
arbitrarily.  Here's an example...  Imagine you're on a slow
connection (say.. 28.8) and you're browsing you're favorite binaries
group.  You see a great program that you just have to have, so you
mark all the uuencoded parts and hit "XU".  And wait...  And
Wait... And Wait.

	Since Gnus can already fetch articles in the background (I
assume this is what gnus-asynchronous toggles), is there not a way to
do all fetching in the background.  The TCP process that connects to
the NNTP server (at least under OS/2) is running as a separate
process, could it not spool all the information into a buffer and
notify Gnus when it was done?

Rat> That would require a multithreaded Emacs kernel, something that
Rat> a) does not exist and, b) likely won't exist for quite some time.

	I know that at least some of this is possible now, for
instance, start up a (shell) and execute some _LONG_ task, say zipping
20M of text or something.  Switch to another window, and the shell
keeps feeding output to the *Shell* buffer, while you're doing other
things.

-- 
... They laughed at Edison and Einstein, but somehow I still feel uncomfortable
   when they laugh at me.  -Ashleigh Brilliant (_Pot Shots_)
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