Re: nnslashdot

[Wes Hardaker <wjhardaker@ucdavis.edu>]

>>>>> On 09 Jul 1999 19:23:29 +0200, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> said:

Lars> Scratch that.  We have a single nnslashdot group.  When you
Lars> select that, you get to read the headlines.  And then there's a
Lars> magic command that lets you select each topic in a new group,
Lars> kinda like nndoc.  nnslashtopic groups?  But the groups have to
Lars> be persistent, since we want to keep track of what articles we
Lars> have read.

That'd be cool, and was sort of what I was thinking...

You know what you need Lars?  New functionality!  I was thinking it
would be really cool to have newsgroups where only the headers from
the first articles of each thread were downloaded, and then when you
click on them it would start downloading the rest.  The backend I'd
really like this for is nnimap, but I doubt any backend but something
like nnslashdot could really make use of it...

Actually, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to make gnus more
asynchronous, and I think its possible to do things like dynamic
summary buffer updates while you're looking at it and its still
pulling in headers.  You'd have to keep a hash of the places to put
things is all based on the sorting preferences (which, um, you may
want to start with just one).  Then, it would have to be an external
program (rather than elisp) doing the fetching since you'd have to
have gnus operate in "do something when data comes in to a buffer"
mode, which I've never looked into much so I'm talking without
knowledge about how truly feasible it would be.

Anyway, that way entering groups would be lighting fast, but the
generation of the summary buffer would happen before your eyes but
would probably be slower (but pertier)...  Now the true feat would to
be able to read articles as things were coming in as well, which
should also be possible I think.

Dynamic group updates would be cool too...  You get a group buffer
listing and the items slowly change from * to 75, etc...

All this requires backends that use external programs I would think
though, which is not necessarily a good thing...

-- 
"Ninjas aren't dangerous.  They're more afraid of you than you are of them."