After many months I have updated the gnus-select2 feature branch. This
incorporates a number of bug fixes as well as updating to the latest
master. I have been using this version (or something close to it) for
nearly a year with no problems. Please check it out and if no obvious
bugs appear I will figure out how to push this into master.
This branch introduces a new "virtual" backend, nnselect, that allows an
arbitrary list of messages to be treated as a normal gnus group. The
messages may come from multiple servers and multiple backends. The
resulting group behaves in (almost) all respects like any real group:
messages may be threaded, marked, moved, deleted, copied, etc. nnselect
groups may be ephemeral or persistent.
An obvious use case for nnselect is to produce a functional group out of
the messages produced by some kind of search. In this feature branch
searching (performed by nnir) simply returns a list of articles that is
passed to nnselect, which handles the group creation and message
manipulation. (This should be transparent to the user---that is,
searching should appear to function as before, except that the group
created from the search has more functionality).
Below is a first pass at some documentation that hasn't yet been pushed
into the gnus manual.
=nnselect= is a select method for virtual groups composed of messages
from other groups that may span multiple servers and backends. For the
most part these groups behave like any other group: messages may be
threaded, marked, moved, deleted, copied, etc.; groups may be
ephemeral or persistent; groups may be created via
gnus-group-make-group or browsed as foreign via
gnus-group-browse-foreign-server.
The key to using an nnselect group is specifying the messages to
include. Each nnselect group has a group parameter =nnselect-specs=
which is an alist with two elements: a function =nnselect-function=;
and arguments =nnselect-args= to be passed to the function, if any.
The function =nnselect-function= must return a vector. Each element of
this vector is in turn a 3-element vector corresponding to one
message. The 3 elements are: the fully-qualified group name; the
message number; and a "score" that can be used for additional
sorting. The values for the score are arbitrary, and are not used
directly by the nnselect method---they may, for example, all be set
to 100.
As an example we might have a group whose nnselect-specs are
(nnselect-specs
(nnselect-function . identity)
(nnselect-args .
[["nnimap+work:mail" 595 100]
["nnimap+home:sent" 223 100]
["nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.emacs.gnus.general" 23666 100])))
Here the function is the identity and the argument is just a list of
messages.
Or the function might be a search query:
(nnselect-specs
(nnselect-function . nnir-run-query)
(nnselect-args
(nnir-query-spec
(query . "FLAGGED")
(criteria . ""))
(nnir-group-spec
("nnimap:home")
("nnimap:work"))))
This creates a group including all flagged messages on two imap
servers, "home" and "work".
And one last example. Here is a function that runs a search query to
find all message that have been received over the past =days=
(defun my-recent-email (days)
(let ((query-spec
(list
(cons 'query
(format-time-string "SENTSINCE %d-%b-%Y"
(time-subtract (current-time)
(days-to-time days))))
(cons 'criteria "")))
(group-spec (list (list "nnimap:home") (list "nnimap:work"))))
(nnir-run-query (cons 'nnir-specs
(list (cons 'nnir-query-spec query-spec)
(cons 'nnir-group-spec group-spec))))))
Then an nnselect-specs
(nnselect-specs
(nnselect-function . my-recent-email)
(nnselect-args . 7))
will provide a group composed of all messages on the home and work
servers received in the last 7 days.
** scanning
Refreshing the selection of an nnselect group by running the
nnselect-function may take a long time to complete. Consequently
nnselect groups are not refreshed by default when
=gnus-group-get-new-news= is invoked. In those cases where running the
function is not too time-consuming, a group parameter of
nnselect-rescan can be set to allow automatic refreshing. A refresh
can always be invoked manually through
=gnus-group-get-new-news-this-group=.
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