Re: Problems with 0.3.2

[radford@robby.caltech.edu (Jim Radford)]

> Jake Colman <colman@ppllc.com> writes:

> > So what's next for us?  This version only supports read access,
> > correct?  Do you have an ETA for write access?

> The only thing stopping write support to work is getting Emacs to
> count the number of characters in a article the same way that IMAP
> servers do.  Jim, did you get APPEND to work?  It could be some MULE
> related error.

I've had support in for DELETE, RENAME, APPEND and CREATE for a while now.
They work for me, YMMV.  Let me know of specific problems with them.  I
have never run with MULE (I hardly run with FSF Emacs any more, sorry
for the incompatibilites that crept in)

Some places where the map between IMAP and Gnus seems to be difficult
and ideas for the future:

 o Gnus wants a Lines header to put in the summary, but we can only
   easily compute Chars.

 o Gnus wants highest and lowest article number, but we can only easily
   compute the number of messages.

 o Gnus has other information besides read, ticked, and replied that
   would be usefull to keep on the server.  Any ideas on where to
   store it?
  
 o Ideally I'd like to store the equivalent of the newsrc on the IMAP
   server (in a hidden group or message) so that complete remote
   syncing is possible. 

 o Currently the only thing we "write" to the server is marks, we
   never run EXPUNGE.  We should.  I have though put in support for
   ephmeral groups in (i.e. we open the group read only), but I
   haven't tested it much.

> Folder filtering is another story, one basicly has to re-write (or
> steal as much as possible) the nnmail filtering stuff but for IMAP. A
> clean implementation would do this in nnimap-request-scan. I.e go
> through all articles in the INBOX and filter and move them to the
> correct folder (IMAP or not IMAP).

I put this on the TODO list.

> Also, take it careful with subscribing to IMAP folders in Gnus, it has
> some bugs that could mess up your .newsrc. Reading IMAP folders from
> the server buffer is the safe way right now (and any bug reports in
> that part is highly appreciated!).

The main problems I have had with this have been when I have had my
nnimap server as my primary server.  When this is the case, you cannot
subscribe for groups from the "server buffer".  The reason seems to be
that Gnus always prepends the server name to the group you subscribe
to in this case; this however should only be done for non-primary
groups.  If you want to subscribe to a primary server's group you
need to use the U command from the Groups buffer.  The symptom
for this is that the number of articles in a groups is always "*".

I this this is a bug in Gnus, but I got know response when I posted
it to `ding'.

-Jim