rebuilding .overview

[Michael Lamoureux <lamour@engin.umich.edu>]

Hmmm, hard to call this a bug, but easy to say that it didn't work
like I expected.  I'm still using the XEmacs version of gnus, and
yesterday, the filesystem that my homedir is on flaked and a large
chunk of a .overview file got corrupted (overwritten with nulls).

I spent quite a bit of time looking at the FAQ, help, and Info docs
trying to figure out how to rebuild it.  The best I could come up with
was M-x nnml-generate-nov-databases (which is probably overkill for
what I needed...is there a better way), and it was hard to find the
documentation for it even though I knew (from reading this list) that
such a beast existed.  Is there an error recovery section of the docs
that I missed?  Is there a better way to just regenerate the .overview
file for one group?

Also, after running the above function all of the new messages (there
were 105 new messages, which is how I noticed there was a problem in
the first place), all of the messages that were added back into the
.overview file were given a mark of read instead of unread.  I had to
enter the group with C-u Ret to see them.  Is that the best default
mark to have for such an operation?

Has this process been changed in the newer versions?  Is it better
documented now?


BTW, just the other day I had another group that didn't show up in the
topic listing until the second message showed up.  I had reported this
bug a while ago, but then couldn't reproduce it.  I just did.  :-/


fyi,
Michael