Re: asynchronous backends

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

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>>>>> "GS" == Greg Stark <gsstark@MIT.EDU> writes:

GS> Namely, it's nice and all that nntp can pre-fetch articles before i ask
GS> for them, but that's not the really cool idea. The really cool idea is
GS> that when i enter a new group and there are four gazillion new articles
GS> and i really want to read them all, while Gnus is fetching the NNTP
GS> scan it can let me go back to editing my files (edit files? in emacs?)

Emacs cannot do this, not the way you want.  Gnus' asynchronous prefetch is
not really completely asynchronous.  It uses a feature called process
filters.  When data from a process arrives it causes Emacs to invoke the
process filter function associated with that process' output stream.  But
Emacs can only do this if it is not already doing something else.  Why?
Because the lisp interpreter is not threaded.  It can only do one thing at
a time.

If you really want to have Gnus running in the background you should start
a second instance of Emacs and run Gnus there.

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