Re: Turning Gnus groups into real objects

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Andy Moreton <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed 17 Jul 2019, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>> [The following is some musings on changing the implementation of
>> mail/news groups in Gnus, and can be ignored if that doesn't interest
>> you. I'll send in actual code as bug reports, later.]
>
> This all sounds useful and sensible. It should make it easier to
> maintain gnus and to extend it to support new backends etc. I assume
> that the idea is to change the runtime representation, while leaving
> the serialized state in .gnusrc.eld unchanged.

Yup, the group serialization won't change, so the files should remain
compatible. In fact the "real" useful change will be turning the
servers into objects, but that will take a lot of work, and these other
changes are sort of meant to "clear out the undergrowth" first, as it
were.

> Please write tests when doing this refactoring work, so that it is
> easier to detect when changes cause compatibility problems.

Will do -- another (eventual) goal of these changes is to separate out
data structures from representation, so the tests could create a dummy
server and groups and test them without needing a whole installation in
place.