Re: RSS with Gnus (elfeed backend?)

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Garjola Dindi <garjola@garjola.net> writes:

> 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.

Check the "Gnus Reference Guide" section of the Gnus manual, in
particular the second section, "Back End Interface". But you won't like
it :)