RSS with Gnus (elfeed backend?)

[Garjola Dindi]

Hi,

I read RSS/Atom feeds in Gnus everyday using a couple of ways.

The first one, is the standard nnrss backend with the following trick I
found somewhere to convert Atom to RSS:
,----
| (require 'mm-url)
| (defadvice mm-url-insert (after DE-convert-atom-to-rss () )
|   "Converts atom to RSS by calling xsltproc."
|   (when (re-search-forward "xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/.*/Atom\""; 
|                          nil t)
|     (goto-char (point-min))
|     (message "Converting Atom to RSS... ")
|     (call-process-region (point-min) (point-max) 
|                        "xsltproc" 
|                        t t nil 
|                        (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/atom2rss.xsl") "-")
|     (goto-char (point-min))
|     (message "Converting Atom to RSS... done")))
`----

Since the nnrss fetching blocks Emacs, this is not useable for a large
number of feeds. So I reserve this approach to a few feeds which are
responsive and that I don't need to check while offline.

For most of my feeds, I use feed2imap
https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap which allows me to download to
disk and view offline using an e-mail backend (I use nnmaildir).
Feed2imap seems to be unmaintained and is not very robust wrt updated
items on the feeds.

Looking for alternatives I found this:
https://protesilaos.com/dotemacs/#h:7e4448ec-3878-4ea2-9cd6-75e9faaac373

which actually describes rather well my issues. I think I am more of a
Gnus fan person than Protesilaos, and I resist to split my inboxes
between Elfeed (https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed) for feeds and Gnus for
everything else.

What I was wondering (but it may be completely dumb) is that if elfeed
itself (which is written in Elisp) could be used as a backend for Gnus.

Since there seem to be Gnus backends for nearly everything, maybe that
interfacing with Elfeed is possible.

What do you think? 

I am not an elisp programmer, but I may try to have a look at it if it
doesn't seem a bad idea to people having written backends for Gnus.

Thanks for your feedback.
  
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