On the newsreader subject

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

   If someone is going to implement a newsreader (and I think Pista has
some code, do not know in which direction), they should probably look
at the design of the GNUS newsreader.

GNUS has a lot of backends for reading news/mail: some do nntp; some
do free-agent like newsreading; some let you browser a mbox file as a
newsgroup (ie, read your mail with this); there is an MH backend; and
a bunch of other methods.

I would like to see the GNOME newsreader/mailreader to be based on
something like this.

There are a bunch of different tasks to be done for a newsreader,
which makes it easy to split the task of writing the newsreader into
various pieces, so hackers can start working at the same time in
different parts of it:

	- Backends: we probably should reuse the existing GNUS design
	  as it is.

		- NNTP backend
		- mbox backend
		- MH backend
		- dir backend

	- newsgroup listing: methods for subscribing to new
	  newsgroups, list newsgroups, classify newsgroups, browse
	  news server contents, support for multiple news servers;
	  
	- Group display: this gets a list of articles;  does scoring
	  based on the rules defined by the user;  does GroupLens
	  evaluation;  does picons display;  

	- article display: once an article is retrieved, it removes
	  extra headers; adds header/quotation coloring; it does
	  mime-decoding; and sticks the result on a gtk-xmhtml widget.

Miguel.