Re: Blue (or was it yellow?) GNUS suggestions

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

Sudish Joseph <sudish@ix.netcom.com> writes:

> How about letting the user decide when to update the cached file?
> We could store the date of the last update in the cache itself,
> maintaining this date separately from the date used for the current
> NEWGROUPS stuff?  I.e., view the cache as a generic local copy of
> the active file, to be used whenever we need to know the names of
> all newsgroups--no need to tie it in with killed groups/new
> groups/etc.

That's a possibility.  Or the cache could be updated when the list of
killed groups reach a certain length or something.  I've added this to
the Red Gnus todo list.

> While this would be very cool in itself, I was thinking more in terms
> of rewriting the core thread/summary code as a loop that checks the
> buffer associated with the NNTP connection, sees if any new headers
> have arrived, slurps all new headers in a list, generates/updates
> current threads/summary info for that list, then loops back to check
> the nntp buffer, etc. 

That sounds very complicated.  And is it useful?  How many new
articles typically arrive for the group you're reading while you're
reading the group?

> Anyways, having a separate process actually generate thread info would
> be very cool, too.  I looked into having mthreads (comes with trn, or
> used to) generate lisp output (even text would be nice, instead of
> it's current binary madness) about 14 - 16 months back--it's not hard
> to do, the code is well commented.  I had it outputting summaries on
> threads very quickly.  It would need to be rewritten to be
> demand-driven rather than run as a daemon (I think that was how it was
> coded, but it's been a long while.)

I don't quite see how Gnus would be helped by this.  The way Gnus
threads things is highly user-customizable (gathering, fuzzy subject
comparison, sparse nodes, ancient articles, ad nauseam).  If we had a
separate process spewing out the threads at us, then we'd lose that
Lispish extensibility.

Anyways, the threading itself is no problem.  The most time spent is
used to generate the summary buffer, and there no external process can
help us.

-- 
  "Yes.  The journey through the human heart 
     would have to wait until some other time."