Re: limiting articles and tagging

[David Carlton]

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:42:39 -0700, David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> said:

> I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
> (e.g. articles I want to respond to, articles where I'm waiting for a
> specific response), and then to have a way to only see the matching
> articles in that group.  (I don't need an open-ended set of tags,
> though I wouldn't mind that; having three or four user-defined tags is
> all I really need.)

Thanks for the responses so far.  I'm still considering org-mode; I
haven't yet given up on an internal-to-gnus solution, though.

I looked at the existing marks; I don't think they'll do the trick,
and unfortunately the marks mechanism doesn't seem like it's
extensible at all.  Browsing through the other gnus-summary-limit
functions, though, "gnus-summary-limit-to-extra" caught my eye.

Just what are the consequences of adding a header to
gnus-extra-headers?  I'm thinking that I could add in another header
there ("X-Tag", say), write some simple commands to edit messages to
add/modify the X-Tag: header in the current article, and write some
wrappers to gnus-summary-limit-to-extra to pick out the articles that
I want.

Does that sound like it should work?  Are there any gotchas I should
know about before I start tinkering with it?  I'm worried that there
might be some index of the extra headers for articles that could cause
problems if I go this route, or something like that.

Also, gnus-summary-limit-to-extra doesn't look that complicated; could
I write a function that does something similar to it but doesn't care
about gnus-extra-headers?  gnus-summary-limit-to-extra calls
gnus-summary-find-matching; when looking through the latter function,
at first I was afraid that it depends on there being a
narrowly-defined set of mail-header-XXX functions, but will
mail-header-extra work with an arbitrary header, will gnus-data-header
return all the headers?

Obviously, I'm not too familiar with the Gnus code base; I'm happy to
do some experimentation, but any tips that people had would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org