Re: Trying to document some of gnus' darkish corners -- please help.

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> writes:

>   1) Is gnus supposed to preserve article marks across backend
>      respools (B r)?  If not, why not, and also if not, then might it
>      make sense to add a separate command that *will* preserve the
>      marks?  (I just lost about 1400 marks because I forgot that gnus
>      would clobber them in this situation -- kinda painful).

I don't know, but it is reasonable not to expect Gnus to do so, since
`spooling' is what happens when Gnus retrieves messages from /var/mail
or the POP server (or wherever).  And obviously, messages don't have
any marks there.

Maybe you really wanted to move the messages?  That preserves marks.
There is a variable gnus-move-split-methods which is similar to
nnmail-split-methods but suggests default groups to move to when doing
`B m'.

>   2) When you mark a crossposted article, what's supposed to happen to
>      the other copies?

Yes, this is a painful situation.  When you read a crossposted
article, the other instances are marked as read.  Apparently, marking
an article as expirable counts as `reading' it.

A couple of years ago (I think) we discussed whether it would be
useful to make the marking behavior of Gnus more orthogonal and
predictable.  The idea was that there should be commands to apply a
mark to the current instance only, and other commands to apply a mark
to all instances, and maybe commands that do what they do now.

I think that especially the `apply this mark to all copies' commands
could be really useful.

As it is, I don't use cross posts.

kai
-- 
Beware of flying birch trees.