Hello all,

I'm starting to use offpunk in offline mode, and I have my subscribed,
news lists, rss, frozen lists etc. All is working nice.

However, I have a number of bookmarked sites that are just big lists of
gopher and gemini pages, or search engines, or links to forums like
hacker news etc. I don't want to a cache to made, i'm happy to only view
these via online mode. Is there a way to tell offpunk not to create
a cache of a list? I know frozen tells it not to update a list but it
still creates a cache on first run.

Thanks
Dylan

Le 24 déc 02 09:46, Dylan D'Silva a écrit :
>Hello all,
>
>I'm starting to use offpunk in offline mode, and I have my subscribed,
>news lists, rss, frozen lists etc. All is working nice.
>
>However, I have a number of bookmarked sites that are just big lists of
>gopher and gemini pages, or search engines, or links to forums like
>hacker news etc. I don't want to a cache to made, i'm happy to only view
>these via online mode. Is there a way to tell offpunk not to create
>a cache of a list? I know frozen tells it not to update a list but it
>still creates a cache on first run.

Hi Dylan,

Indeed, in case a page has never been visited before, it will be cached 
even if in a frozen list. The rationale behind this implementation was 
to ensure that you have a cached version of the children of a frozen 
page.

Let me explain:

1) You are browsing offline and reading a page. That article has a link 
to a nice article with information that may be useful for "projectX"

2) You add the article to the list "projectX", which is frozen because 
you don’t want that page to be modified and replaced by a 404 (like it 
often happens on the modern web)

3) But, in the future, you may read that article and discover it has 
links to other interesting ressources. So you want to cache all children 
of your article.


That’s exactly what Frozen list is doing.


This has the drawback that a link into a frozen list will be downloaded 
if there’s no cache. But I never considered that it would be possible to 
have list of pages without any cache.

Also, this happens only once, so it should not be a big deal.

Could you explain more of your usecase ? How do you have a list of pages 
without cache ? Why is it a big deal if a cache is downloaded the first 
time ?


Ploum

On Mon Dec 2, 2024 at 10:26 AM AEDT, Ploum wrote:
> Le 24 déc 02 09:46, Dylan D'Silva a écrit :
> >Hello all,
> >
> >I'm starting to use offpunk in offline mode, and I have my subscribed,
> >news lists, rss, frozen lists etc. All is working nice.
> >
> >However, I have a number of bookmarked sites that are just big lists of
> >gopher and gemini pages, or search engines, or links to forums like
> >hacker news etc. I don't want to a cache to made, i'm happy to only view
> >these via online mode. Is there a way to tell offpunk not to create
> >a cache of a list? I know frozen tells it not to update a list but it
> >still creates a cache on first run.
>
> Hi Dylan,
>
> Indeed, in case a page has never been visited before, it will be cached 
> even if in a frozen list. The rationale behind this implementation was 
> to ensure that you have a cached version of the children of a frozen 
> page.
>
> Let me explain:
>
> 1) You are browsing offline and reading a page. That article has a link 
> to a nice article with information that may be useful for "projectX"
>
> 2) You add the article to the list "projectX", which is frozen because 
> you don’t want that page to be modified and replaced by a 404 (like it 
> often happens on the modern web)
>
> 3) But, in the future, you may read that article and discover it has 
> links to other interesting ressources. So you want to cache all children 
> of your article.
>
>
> That’s exactly what Frozen list is doing.

I'm happy with the idea of a frozen list. Thank you for providing the
reasoning for this functionality. 

>
>
> This has the drawback that a link into a frozen list will be downloaded 
> if there’s no cache. But I never considered that it would be possible to 
> have list of pages without any cache.
>
> Also, this happens only once, so it should not be a big deal.
>
> Could you explain more of your usecase ? How do you have a list of pages 
> without cache ? Why is it a big deal if a cache is downloaded the first 
> time ?
Sure, I probably didn't explain it very well.

I have bookmarks, these are like any other browser bookmarks. They are
sites of interest or, useful sites that i browse every now and again,
but don't save addresses to brain memory. Take one example, DiscoGem
(Gemini). It has a Capsule of the day. The front page has a long list of
these going back to 2022. There are 715 of them. When I sync offpunk it
gets to this bookmark and start downloading every of those gemini capsules.
That is just one of my bookmarks. I don't need to it to do this for all
of these type of websites. I have another one called NewsWaffle. Which
is a news aggregate for many news websites. It grabs everything from
there. All of this takes time to sync and is using space I don't need it
to use.

I was hoping there was someway to have a bookmark list that doesn't get
synced.  Just like you can subscribe to a list which then syncs to your
tour and if you don't want it on your tour list you can make it normal.
Is there a way to create a list that doesn't sync when you sync in
offline mode?

Dylan


 
>  
>
> Ploum

Le 24 déc 02 10:52, Dylan D'Silva a écrit :
>On Mon Dec 2, 2024 at 10:26 AM AEDT, Ploum wrote:
>> Le 24 déc 02 09:46, Dylan D'Silva a écrit :
>> Also, this happens only once, so it should not be a big deal.
>>
>> Could you explain more of your usecase ? How do you have a list of pages
>> without cache ? Why is it a big deal if a cache is downloaded the first
>> time ?
>Sure, I probably didn't explain it very well.
>
>I have bookmarks, these are like any other browser bookmarks. They are
>sites of interest or, useful sites that i browse every now and again,
>but don't save addresses to brain memory. Take one example, DiscoGem
>(Gemini). It has a Capsule of the day. The front page has a long list of
>these going back to 2022. There are 715 of them. When I sync offpunk it
>gets to this bookmark and start downloading every of those gemini capsules.
>That is just one of my bookmarks. I don't need to it to do this for all
>of these type of websites. I have another one called NewsWaffle. Which
>is a news aggregate for many news websites. It grabs everything from
>there. All of this takes time to sync and is using space I don't need it
>to use.
>
>I was hoping there was someway to have a bookmark list that doesn't get
>synced.  Just like you can subscribe to a list which then syncs to your
>tour and if you don't want it on your tour list you can make it normal.
>Is there a way to create a list that doesn't sync when you sync in
>offline mode?
>

I see two potential solutions:

1. Adding a new "hidden" mode.  but this will be confusing with 
"frozen". Difference between both is really subtle.

2. Changing the "frozen" behaviour. Current one is not intuitive and I’m 
starting to doubt it is really that useful.

But changing a behaviour is something not to be done lightly. We should 
probably discuss this on the -dev mailing list

-- 
Ploum - Lionel Dricot

Blog: https://www.ploum.net
Bikepunk: https://bikepunk.fr/

Le 24 déc 02 10:52, Dylan D'Silva a écrit :
>>
>> This has the drawback that a link into a frozen list will be downloaded
>> if there’s no cache. But I never considered that it would be possible to
>> have list of pages without any cache.
>>
>> Also, this happens only once, so it should not be a big deal.
>>
>> Could you explain more of your usecase ? How do you have a list of pages
>> without cache ? Why is it a big deal if a cache is downloaded the first
>> time ?
>Sure, I probably didn't explain it very well.
>
>I have bookmarks, these are like any other browser bookmarks. They are
>sites of interest or, useful sites that i browse every now and again,
>but don't save addresses to brain memory. Take one example, DiscoGem
>(Gemini). It has a Capsule of the day. The front page has a long list of
>these going back to 2022. There are 715 of them. When I sync offpunk it
>gets to this bookmark and start downloading every of those gemini capsules.
>That is just one of my bookmarks. I don't need to it to do this for all
>of these type of websites. I have another one called NewsWaffle. Which
>is a news aggregate for many news websites. It grabs everything from
>there. All of this takes time to sync and is using space I don't need it
>to use.
>
>I was hoping there was someway to have a bookmark list that doesn't get
>synced.  Just like you can subscribe to a list which then syncs to your
>tour and if you don't want it on your tour list you can make it normal.
>Is there a way to create a list that doesn't sync when you sync in
>offline mode?

One workaround is to sync only a subset of lists.

If you do 

"offpunk --sync tour to_fetch myquicklist $REFRESH_INTERVAL"

only those 3 lists will be synced and other will not be touched at all. 
This might allows you to do a small script that does exactly what you 
want.

-- 
Ploum - Lionel Dricot

Blog: https://www.ploum.net
Bikepunk: https://bikepunk.fr/