Re: Nice blog post - Org-mode in Your Pocket Is a GNU-Shaped Devil

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com> writes:

> For me it is the other way around.  I want to couple with Emacs more
> closely, but Gnus prevents me from doing so.  A few gripes follow.

> 1. Emacs is single threaded, so a network interruption while reading my
>    email over IMAP means my emacs server is stuck!

It would be so appealing if Emacs was really using threading for its
windows.  Tom Tromey seems to be making a very courageous attempt at it,
but is still hitting various problems and walls.  I wonder if he will
succeed at the end.

In my case, Emacs is indeed stuck for a few seconds, not enough to
bother me significantly.  I read that some people combine fetchmail,
procmail and other tools so Emacs does not IMAP itself; I just did not
want to dive into all the locking and synchronization issues implied by
such tools.

> 2. Oh that's easy to solve, use maildirs (sync with OfflineIMAP).  That
>    does not work well because Gnus uses its own flags (an example where
>    Gnus actually breaks standards)!  There are some hacks around that
>    out in the wild, so let's let it slide.
> 3. Gnus stores some meta information/cache for maildirs in a .nnmaildir
>    folder *inside* the maildir directory tree!
>      maildir
>      ├── .nnmaildir
>      ├── cur
>      ├── new
>      └── tmp
>    I do not know how, but this supposed meta information or cache takes
>    about 2/3 of disk space as the original maildir!  Obviously that is a
>    problem for large mailboxes.

I never really studies IMAP, and use it rather naively, so I take your
word about Gnus not being straight about it.  Sorry to hear that.  I've
not been bitten yet, or maybe I'm just too naive to know.

However, I remember that I often had to read Gnus structures in
external, non-Emacs programs, and it is indeed a challenge each time.  I
merely try to not do that anymore! :-)

> I use mutt-kz (mutt with notmuch integration) and emacsclient.  With
> support for linking using org-notmuch, I couldn't be happier.

Thanks for the hints, which I save, could be useful one day, who knows!
:-) When I left Emacs for other lands, years ago, I decided for Mutt and
used it for many years (before switching to others, and finally
Thunderbird).  With many stunts (a bit too much of them should I say), I
could get Mutt to do about anything I wanted (but never had such success
with Thunderbird).  Back to Gnus, and configuring it as little as I can,
I have the impression of recovering some simplicity on the user side.
Moreover, Org nicely plays with Gnus (or almost).

François