Re: gnus-glimpse.el -- search a newsgroup using glimpse

[Greg Stark <gsstark@MIT.EDU>]

Interestingly i was just thinking the other day about how to implement
searching through a group for text in an article in a way that would support
protocol features to do it on the server side. It might be worth thinking of
some abstraction to handle this though i'm not sure of exactly what it should
look like.

For my purposes it would be enough to provide optional backend methods to
perform the various searches the / keymap supports. Then Gnus would implement
them itself the way it does currently if the backend doesn't provide them.
This is a bit limitting for something like gnus-glimpse where you might want
to drop in different search engines for the same backend, or support multiple
backends in the same search engine. But maybe with nnoo it wouldn't be hard
for gnus-glimpse to provide useful generic searching functions that the
backends could easily use to implement searching without too much code
duplication. Then you could set nnmail-search-engine or to 'glimpse and the
backend functions would try to use glimpse if available, and if not let Gnus
implement the searching functions itself. 

I would like to see something like this, it would let us do some funky things
like have / do a dejanews query but use the results to access the normal news
server, which would let you tick and cache articles on your normal news
server. It would also let me take advantage of native searching features in
the protocol for which i wrote a backend.

greg