Directory Groups Other Sources Document Groups
From the nndir
backend (which reads a single spool-like
directory), it's just a hop and a skip to nneething
, which
pretends that any arbitrary directory is a newsgroup. Strange, but
true.
When nneething
is presented with a directory, it will scan this
directory and assign article numbers to each file. When you enter such
a group, nneething
must create ``headers'' that Gnus can use.
After all, Gnus is a newsreader, in case you're
forgetting. nneething
does this in a two-step process. First, it
snoops each file in question. If the file looks like an article (i.e.,
the first few lines look like headers), it will use this as the head.
If this is just some arbitrary file without a head (e.g. a C source
file), nneething
will cobble up a header out of thin air. It
will use file ownership, name and date and do whatever it can with these
elements.
All this should happen automatically for you, and you will be presented with something that looks very much like a newsgroup. Totally like a newsgroup, to be precise. If you select an article, it will be displayed in the article buffer, just as usual.
If you select a line that represents a directory, Gnus will pop you into
a new summary buffer for this nneething
group. And so on. You can
traverse the entire disk this way, if you feel like, but remember that
Gnus is not dired, really, and does not intend to be, either.
There are two overall modes to this action---ephemeral or solid. When
doing the ephemeral thing (i.e., G D from the group buffer), Gnus
will not store information on what files you have read, and what files
are new, and so on. If you create a solid nneething
group the
normal way with G m, Gnus will store a mapping table between
article numbers and file names, and you can treat this group like any
other groups. When you activate a solid nneething
group, you will
be told how many unread articles it contains, etc., etc.
Some variables:
nneething-map-file-directory
|
All the mapping files for solid |
nneething-exclude-files
|
All files that match this regexp will be ignored. Nice to use to exclude auto-save files and the like, which is what it does by default. |
nneething-map-file
|
Name of the map files. |