Re: Gnus: Thread notes?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Anyway, please report bugs/feature requests. I've gotten a bit
>> distracted from Gnorb while working on EBDB, and now attacking bits of
>> Gnus, but it's really all the same project.
>
> Can I ask some more usage questions?

Of course!

> I have a thread where I want to mark some Emails as "to do" and store
> some notes about them (about what's important in them, and what I have
> to do).  The thread already had become longish before I decided to use
> Gnorb on it.
>
> Did I do it right?  At first, I used `org-capture' (on the
> chronologically first message that seemed relevant) to create a new org
> headline for the thread.  I think this message didn't get a "&" in the
> summary before I explicitly added another note for it with
> `gnorb-gnus-incoming-do-todo' - is this expected?

A few things: if you're adding several messages at once, you can "bulk
associate": use Gnus' process mark ("#") to mark all the relevant
messages (or "T #" for a whole thread), and then
`gnorb-gnus-incoming-do-todo'. I don't think this will work until you
_already_ have an Org heading in place -- if you mark a bunch of
messages and use `org-capture', I'm not sure it will do the right thing.
It should, though -- I'll see if I can add that.

The "&" might not be showing up simply because the gnorb function
doesn't re-draw the Gnus summary buffer. I've found that mildly annoying
in the past, I'll try to add that, too.

> Then I `gnorb-gnus-incoming-do-todo' on the other messages in this
> thread that seemed important to add notes about them.  That worked, and
> I also got the "&", though I wished these notes where explicitly linked
> with the corresponding message ids in the org buffer - can I let Gnorb
> do this automatically?  I can C-c v on the note, but that doesn't show
> me which note corresponds to which message, and vice versa.

This is something I wanted right from the beginning (to annotate
individual messages), but have never come up with a good UI for it.

Are you using a log drawer on the Org heading? That's my preferred
method of tracking TODO progress. What I could do is, when you choose
the "add a note" action (or the TODO state change prompts for a state
change log note), automatically insert the message id of the relevant
message into the log note text.

Alternately, if you wanted to keep the Gnorb notes separate, add the
note to the registry entry.

But then what? The only two ideas I can come up with are:

Provide a `tabulated-list-mode' buffer showing correspondences between
message headers and notes. But it seems a bit goofy to provide a whole
new view just for this information.

Provide a command that can be called on a message to see the relevant
note. There could then be three different marks: "¡" for relevance, "&"
for association, and "@" (or something) for association with note.

Any ideas?

> When I opened the group again, the relevant messages were not visible
> (because they now were "old").  I had to / o in the summary buffer (btw,
> is there a way to let A T fetch and show also "old" messages so that I
> get the complete thread without / o?), I then marked the relevant
> messages "important" ("!") so that they were shown the next time.

Avoiding the need to tick messages was one of the points of Gnorb! But I
see what you mean -- active Org projects are not automatically
visible...

Hmm, ideal behavior would be that all messages associated with TODOs not
in a "DONE" state would always be visible. That would be nice!

I don't think Gnus allows for this behavior by default, but what I could
do is provide a `gnus-summary-limit-to-gnorb-undone' command, bound to
"/ g". You'd enter the group, hit that key, and it would display all
currently-active tracked messages. That's not a bad idea. I'd still like
to make it do that by default, though.

"A T" ought to fetch old messages too, I use that all the time...
Threading in Gnus is arcane magic. You can almost always get it to do
exactly what you want, but it might take research and experimentation.

> From the org buffer, I get the C-c v (`gnorb-org-view') thing working,
> but every time I want to use, seems I have to go to the server buffer
> (^) to make it work - when I don't do this I get user-error: "Please add
> a "nngnorb" backend to your gnus installation".  Do you have a clue why
> this happens and how I can solve it?

This is a dumb artifact of how Gnus currently works, and this
requirement will go away if we can ever get the feature/gnus-select
branch to land. The backend is currently necessary so that nnir uses the
correct Gnorb function to retrieve the messages. Have you added a
"nngnorb" server to your `gnus-secondary-select-methods'? I'm not sure
why simply entering the server buffer would do anything.

Hmm, did you add the nngnorb server via "a" in the server buffer? I've
never tried doing that, probably safer to add it to
`gnus-secondary-select-methods'.

> Finally, is there a way to show the complete thread from the Gnorb nnir
> group buffer?

Not with Gnorb tools. "A T" is probably all you've got, but try playing
with `gnus-refer-thread-use-nnir' and surrounding code? 

> Please excuse my ignorance, I'm not really a Gnus expert...

No one is!

Eric