topics & tomorrow

[Vadim Gutnik <gutnik@mtl.mit.edu>]

Simon writes:

> I'm working on making the *Server buffer* display a hierarchial view
> of the IMAP server and let the user IMAP-subscribe to groups much like
> Netscape's subscribe window. That's good, I think.

Hmmm. I'd rather not have to go into the server buffer at all except
maybe to change server variable settings. All the other back ends let you
subscribe to groups directly from the *Group* buffer; I think nnimap
would be better served by being more like gnus than like Netscape.

> One further step in making Gnus a more IMAPish mailreader is to merge
> Gnus's concepts of "topics" with nnimap, a quote from the Gnus Todo
> list:

> * a way to say that all groups within a specific topic comes from a
> particular server? Hm.

Huh? What is there to merge? Topics are part of the *Group* buffer,
and I can already put nnimap groups into various topics.

> I think this is a nice idea. But. Making gnus-topic backend aware
> would require lots of work (I think), and I've (temporarily) decided
> not to do this, but anyway I'd like to know if anyone thinks this
> would be a good idea?

I'm don't know what you're suggesting that you do, but since topics work
for me now, I guess I'm against screwing things up. :)

> Topics, sub-topics etc could reflect the server-side hiarchy of IMAP
> mailboxes. Instead of subscribing to IMAP mailboxes in gnus, one would
> subscribe to a IMAP server which contain several mailboxes, controlled
> by the backend (ie the topic only contains imap-subscribed mailboxes,
> and imap-subcribing to new mailboxes is done in the *server buffer*).

Oh, yuck. Ok, this I don't think I like. Topics should be completely
arbitrary and controlled independently of what the server wants.

So I should be able to have 

<gnus>
  <misc>
    nnimap:group_1
    nntp:group_2 
  <other>
    nnimap:group_3
    nnml:group_4

etc.  

> One basic questions is: Do anyone use "topics" in Gnus?

Yes. But this is done. :) I like the way it works now. I don't think
anything needs to be done in nnimap to support this.

	Vadim