Re: Some numbering problem (nnml?)

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

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:

> Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> > How hard can it really be for gnus to count files on disk for mail
> > groups?
> 
> That's done by individual backends, not Gnus proper.  But anyway,
> backends already report the number of articles in the output of
> -request-group.  Gnus ignores this in favor of last-first+1 (according
> to the 5.8.7 texinfo).  Anyone know why?  Obviously, backends are
> capable of making at least as good an estimate as that, and probably
> much better.  Some backends might not actually do this, but this seems
> like a bad way to handle them.

One reason is that the number doesn't help much to calculate the
number of unread articles.  For example, -request-group returns 3 5 9
(the number of articles, first, last), and you've read 5-8. What is
the number of unread articles?  Gnus doesn't know whether number 9 is
missing.

ShengHuo