Re: RSS with Gnus (elfeed backend?)

[Garjola Dindi]

On Fri 02-Apr-2021 at 20:21:07 +02, Tim Landscheidt
<tim@tim-landscheidt.de> wrote: 
> Garjola Dindi <garjola@garjola.net> wrote:
>>
> It's even worse because Emacs already has yet another (rath-
> er fragile) RSS reader, newsticker, that AFAIR does not
> share code with either, and nnrss has an asynchronous, yet
> somewhat manual out-of-Gnus retriever
> (nnrss-generate-download-script), the keys for moving to the
> next or the next unread article in newsticker are "reversed"
> compared to Gnus, elfeed seems to have a separate system for
> scoring articles, etc., etc., etc.  newsticker as well as
> nnrss feel like "technology demonstrators", i. e., yeah, you
> can read RSS feeds in Emacs or Gnus, but nobody really does.
>

And there is also org-feed.el which generates an org-mode outline from
RSS or Atom feeds.

> So if someone would implement a (preferably new) nice, clean
> backend for Gnus that DWIM, I'd be eternally grateful :-).

I have spent some time reading elfeed's source code and it provides a
nice API. What I don't like about elfeed is that it is «entry-oriented»,
that is, all articles are dumped in the same inbox and all the selection
operations are done through tags. I think that a Gnus back-end could use
elfeed's API to filter the entries and generate the content of Gnus's
groups (one group per feed, for instance), while all the feed updating,
downloading, etc. could be delegated to elfeed.

What I have in mind is writing a light Gnus backend (inspired for
instance from the one for Twitter that Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote [1]) that
just uses elfeed behind the scenes.

The difficulty is that I do not understand how a Gnus backend works, so
I will have to study this first. 

If anybody can point to an easy to understand Gnus backend to get me
started, I would be very grateful.

Thanks.


Footnotes:
[1]  https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/09/19/you-can-read-twitter-with-gnus/

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