Re: What is happening in agentized groups?

[ShengHuo ZHU <zsh@cs.rochester.edu>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

[...]

> But back to this business of the undownloaded entries in summary
> buffer:  I'm not sure I see what the value of that is.  In my case it
> just gives me a huge summary buffer to process if I should happen to
> enter the group with C-u.

Actually, the word "Undownload" in the summary buffer has different
meaning from the one marked as @. Gnus agent grabs articles in three
steps, 1) updating the active file (automatically when you type 'g' in
the group buffer), 2) braiding .overview files (when you type `J s' or
automatically when you enter the group plugged and if gnus-agent-cache
is non-nil), 3) grabbing the articles (when you type 'J s' and if the
predicates return true).

If you enter a group unplugged without step 2, some articles are shown
as "Undownloaded article ???" in the summary buffer, because the NOV
is unknown.  So, it is not related to whether the predicates return
true or false. Before I patched it in January 2002, those articles
would be marked as read though you didn't see them.  It is bad because
you might miss some news or mails.  Also, without the patch, if
gnus-agent-cache is nil and you didn't download the .overview
manually, when you enter the group unplugged, some marks which you
marked when plugged will lose, because nnagent tells Gnus those
articles didn't exist on nnagent, but Gnus interprets it as those
articles didn't exist at all.

Now, the question is what about canceled or expired articles. Ideally,
canceled articles should not be listed, and expired articles on the
server should not either, but agent-expired articles, which are still
on the server, should. However, nnagent knows neither whether they
exist on the server, nor whether they are canceled or expired on the
server (at least not in the current mechanism).  So, for the safety
reason, let's assume those articles exist.

ShengHuo