Re: B DEL is being treated as expiry?

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@charcoal.com>]

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:
> The backend interface must define how this is expressed, and all
> backends must be made to conform to that specification.

So make them conform.

Why is this hard?

I solved today's problem, so that things just plain *work* according
to established intent -- so that -delete-article *stops making mistakes*.

You have a view toward a different problem; feel free to solve that.
I am of the opinion that this different problem is most readily solved
merely by convincing the currently non-conforming backends to
understand nnmail-expiry-target, plus adding 1 general function +
keybinding to provide expire-right-now as well.

> g-s-d-a is not supposed to know the details of how backends decide
> what to do with expirable articles; it's only supposed to know what
> to pass to nnchoke-request-expire-articles.

-delete-article doesn't know squat about anything to do with expiry at
all -- it isn't *doing* expiry so it doesn't *care* about expiry,
other than to turn it off unconditionally.  It deletes, nothing more
and nothing less.  Having been broken, it now does so again, more
consistently and properly than it used to, apparently.

It sounds like the problem you have is that there exists any use of
nnmail-expiry-target.  Feel free to redesign that, if the urge moves
you, but I think you're working too hard.

> The problem isn't specific to nnmaildir; your fix is specific to
> nnmail-derived backends.  I don't know, but I'd guess that it also
> fails for nnimap.

The fix is general with regard to _today's_ expectation that
nnmail-expiry-target is the specified way to define expiry habits, by
means of overriding any general expiry intention so that deletion, and
only deletion, is what occurs.  gnus-request-expire-articles works
this way, and -delete-article accommodates it.

> It isn't completely disjoint, because it's likely that we'll want to
> use the same backend function for both purposes.  (Otherwise we'll
> be duplicating a significant amount of code.)

Please.  The totality of -delete-article is 40 lines.  You can find
numerous examples of duplicated code in Gnus much larger than that.
Just wander through the various backends which are derived from one
another.  (Once upon a midnight dreary, nnml came out of nnspool.)