[Evolution-hackers] Newsgroup lists

[Meilof <meilof myrealbox com>]

Hello,

I'm working on NNTP support in Evolution, particularly the subscription 
interface currently, but I've encountered some problems.

First, I've written the code that contact the news server for a list of 
newsgroups by implementing nntp_store_get_folder_info using the code 
from camel-nntp-grouplist.c. For my test news server, which has 
something like 5 newsgroups, this works pretty well, and the groups show 
up nicely in the subscription dialog, but for the news server of my ISP, 
which has _much_ more groups, I find the subscription dialog to be way 
too slow. After the nntp_store_get_folder_info code has returned, and 
the complete newsgroup list is in, on my PC, a 2GHZ box, it still takes 
the dialog about five *minutes* to finally display the information, time 
during which Evolution totally locks up (apart from also consuming a 
huge amount of memory).

Maybe the best approach would be not to show all groups at once, but to 
have a search dialog box or a tree structure or something, or the 
subscription dialog should be optimized to be able to handle large 
amounts of folders. Are there any easy solutions for this?

Another thing: quickly looking at em-subscribe-editor.c, I found there 
is no difference between the initial loading of the folder list and 
subsequent loadings with the "Reload" button from the subscription 
dialog. For news servers that don't support the NEWGROUPS and DATE 
command, this would mean every time the dialog pops up, the complete 
newsgroup list needs to be loaded, which might get a little irritating 
after a while, especially if it remains this slow. Do you think this is 
acceptable, or should I look whether I can do anything about it?


Meilof
-- meilof myrealbox com