Re: nnimap usage model

[David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>]

Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> writes:

> David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> writes:
>
>> Thanks for your reply, Kevin
>>
>> Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> writes:
>>
>>> The agent has three faces and a format specifier to highlight articles
>>> that have NOT been downloaded.  The faces appear by default while the
>>> format specifier must be added through customization.
>>
>> Hmm, I'll see if I can track that down.  Could you elaborate on what
>> you mean by "appear by default", and where the customization for the
>> format specifier can be found?
>
> The variable gnus-summary-highlight controls how an article is
> highlighted in the summary.  It contains a list of conditions and
> faces over which Gnus will iterate to the first true condition
> then select that face.  If you don't want to use faces to highlight
> the undownloaded articles, you should customize gnus-summary-highlight
> to delete the three cons cells that refer to the
> gnus*undownloaded-face.

Yes, thanks, I understood all that from your previous postings; I
don't think it really answers my questions, though.  Should I rephrase
them?  I thought they were fairly precisely worded and I'm not sure I
can do better.

>>> If you don't like using colors to indicate the undownloaded articles,
>>> you can customize gnus-summary-highlight.  Just remove the three cons
>>> cells that refer to gnus*undownloaded-face.
>>>
>>> If you want to use +/- markers you can add %O to gnus-summary-line-format.
>>
>> I'll consider that as an alternative; it might be preferable.
>>
>>> You're the first to describe newly downloaded articles as being marked
>>> as "ancient".  
>>
>> I think I was mis-describing the marks; the face used for ancient
>> articles looks a lot like the one used for un-downloaded articles on
>> NTEmacs when you don't use Courier New :(
>
> You can change the characters used by customizing
> gnus-undownloaded-mark and gnus-downloaded-mark.  The +/- were
> selected for historical reasons.

I understand that; I wasn't using the article marks in my
summary-line-format; I was just referring to the face (i.e. colors)
used.

>> NOTE: also, I'm not really sure what I'm getting from
>> gnus-agent-cache.  All I can find in the documentation says "the agent
>> is also a big cache!"  Can somebody explain what that means?
>
> It is an internal switch for temporarily disabling the agent.  You
> should leave it set to t.  Gnus will bind it to nil as appropriate
> times.

Boy, that just makes it even more mysterious!

The "hate" part of my love-hate relationship with GNUs is mostly due
to not being able to get a clear and precise understanding of the
system architecture and consequently, how to make it do what I want.
I've tried to RTFM, which is imposing enough already.  I'd hate to
think that the only way to really understand things is to use the
source, Luke.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com