Gnus Manual. Node: A Programmers Guide to Gnus

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10.5: A Programmers Guide to Gnus

It is my hope that other people will figure out smart stuff that Gnus can do, and that other people will write those smart things as well. To facilitate that I thought it would be a good idea to describe the inner workings of Gnus. And some of the not-so-inner workings, while I'm at it.

You can never expect the internals of a program not to change, but I will be defining (in some details) the interface between Gnus and its backends (this is written in stone), the format of the score files (ditto), data structures (some are less likely to change than others) and general methods of operation.

  • Gnus Utility Functions Common functions and variable to use.
  • Backend Interface How Gnus communicates with the servers.
  • Score File Syntax A BNF definition of the score file standard.
  • Headers How Gnus stores headers internally.
  • Ranges A handy format for storing mucho numbers.
  • Group Info The group info format.
  • Extended Interactive Symbolic prefixes and stuff.
  • Emacs/XEmacs Code Gnus can be run under all modern Emacsen.
  • Various File Formats Formats of files that Gnus use.
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