RFC: Akonadi NNTP resource

[Volker Krause]

On Sunday, 2 June 2019 17:36:39 CEST Pino Toscano wrote:
> Hi PIM folks,
> 
> (please CC me, I'm not subscribed to this list)
> 
> due to the unmaintainer knode, some time ago I started to work on an
> Akonadi resource for NNTP articles.
> There was a NNTP resource done by Volker Krause in kdepim-runtime many
> years ago; 

KNode is what originally dragged me into KDE PIM, and the first time merging 
NNTP support into KMail was proposed I think was by Simon Hausmann on a bus to 
the Akademy 2004 venue, nice to see this finally been done, just took us 15 
years ;-)

> that resource used the NNTP KIO, which causes a number of
> limitations (only one connection opened at all, difficult to interact
> with, own parsing of NNTP, etc).  I ended up basically rewriting it from
> scratch, using libetpan [1] (which seems to be the only stable C or C++
> library handling NNTP, and widespread in modern distributions).
> Also, a change I did was to make it expose the messages as plain
> message/rfc822 items, which makes it possible to use OOTB in e.g. kmail.

In theory adding them as KMime::NewsArticle should work too, as KMime::Message 
is a base class of that... ah, but it indeed seems broken atm, fixed in 
D21683. Could become relevant for deeper integration into applications.

> You can find my resource in my scratch area [2]. Some time ago, I asked
> Dan for feedback on it, so I'm generally sure it is not totally wrong
> 
> :-) In any case, it would be nice to get more feedback about it.

>From what I remember, one thing I was missing in Akonadi for this back then 
was the "sliding window" expiry of the local cache. That however is something 
that is nowadays also very relevant for use in a mobile context. So I hope 
we'll eventually get that in Akonadi so it doesn't have to be implemented in 
the resource.

> The only tricky UI bit is the newsgroups subscription: right now you
> have to fill all the details when creating a new resource, then fetch
> the list of newsgroups, and then tick all the ones you are interested
> in.  Other than this, kmail itself may benefit from few more integration
> bits, and that is something I will possibly do in the future.

Server-side subscription might be special-cased for IMAP in KMail atm, maybe 
something to generalize a bit.

Regards,
Volker
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