Re: Back to Gnus?

[Vitaly Mayatskikh <v.mayatskih@gmail.com>]

At Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:35:49 -0400, Dave Abrahams wrote:

> > (setq mime-view-buttons-visible nil)
> 
> And how does that help when I need to see MIME parts?

Ok, I got your point. That can be worked out too.

> Just getting WL to display MIME reasonably has been an adventure, and
> I'm *still* encountering quirks I never had with Gnus.  It doesn't
> "just work" out-of-the-box; not even close.

True, WL does not have good enough settings out of the box.

> Right, almost works perfectly (still leaves the background color on
> the end of the line I'm editing) ... provided I can afford to
> re-highlight the entire buffer after every keypress.  If this is what
> you're expected to do to make it work, why isn't that built in?

Because I don't like to re-highlight buffer after every key press and
I'm too lazy to fix it in a real way.

> > That can be solved easily, if somebody really wants to solve it.
> 
> You're saying all of those related problems can be solved easily?

Easy enough, if you want to fix them. WL is very hackable piece of
software.

> > You can't solve the fact that Gnus is only good for NNTP :) So, its
> > IMAP sucks, 
> 
> My understanding is that in Emacs24 its IMAP is pretty darned good.
> I'm going to try it and see.

Good to know.
 
> > offline support sucks, 
> 
> I didn't find offline support to suck any worse than it does for WL.
> What's the problem?

It simply didn't work 2.5 years ago, not at all.

> As for hackability, WL uses a non-standard undocumented OOP system

This is elisp, it does not have any standard OO-system. Though even in
Common Lisp people usually don't need and don't use full power of CLOS
and MOP.

> and has almost no internal comments and no docstrings.  Working on
> WL has been no picnic for me.  As for functionality, WL is painfully
> slow for very large groups, of which I have quite a few (both mail
> and NNTP).

I personally found WL is capable to handle large folders on slow (bad
gprs) link better than other clients. Those days I was subscribed to
linux kernel mailing list and that gave me ~800 mails a day, which I
was lazy to read or even to expunge, so my folder size was of 150k
mails :)

> That's exactly how I felt after arriving at WL from Gnus.  But
> combined with rumored nnimap improvements and the problem of hanging
> on dropped connections, the other inconveniences are starting to tip
> the scales back for me.  This is a somewhat desperate plea to help me
> avoid investing in Gnus.

I was reluctant to switch from Gnus either, and invested far more
efforts to bring IMAP support in Gnus at better scale. The reaction of
crowd at gnus ml was: "Yes, it good to have working IMAP, but it's
hard to improve it and not to break tons of legacy code". May be
people have found another, less bloody way to fix their IMAP, or they
invested even more time to fix every bit.

And I still think the reader in Gnus is better than what WL provides,
but I want mail client to support IMAP, what Gnus was obviously
missing in past.
-- 
wbr, Vitaly