gnus (cvs) decides to make nntp groups "mail" groups

[Ami Fischman <usenet@fischman.org>]

For some reason, gnus seems to decide to consider random foreign nntp groups
as mail groups.  The symptom that got me to debug this was that as of 2 days
ago, nntp+news.gnus.org:gnus.ding kept coming up with >37000 unread
articles.  I know y'all are talkative, but it seemed a bit much even for
this group :).  So, I look in ~/.newsrc.eld, and I see that the third
element in the gnus.ding group (the one following the level) is (1 . 2). Ah
ha, say I to myself, the count got messed up somehow.  So fine, I change
that "2" to 38700 or so.  Restart gnus, and lo, nothing's changed!  Looking
at .newsrc.eld again, I see that it's back at (1 . 2).  Tried a few more
times (to make sure I was really saving, exiting, restarting in the right
order).  A couple of days pass, and now it's the weekend so I have time to
look into this further: somehow, this group made it into my ~/mail/active
file, with a line saying:
nntp+news.gnus.org:gnus.ding 1 1 y

Deleting the line makes gnus honor my changes to .newsrc.eld.  There were
two other non-nnml groups in my ~/mail/active file:

nntp+news.verio.net:gnu.emacs.help 37406 37406 y
nntp+news.opera.no:opera.linux 7871 7871 y

They are both groups I read, and I've had similar issues (where the group
shows up completely unread) with both, but killing and resubscribing solved
the problem before (I think).

So, why is gnus putting these nntp groups in ~/mail/active?  Once it does
so, why is it honoring the information there?

I am using oort 0.05 cvs as of this morning w/ gnu emacs 21.1.

-- 
  Ami Fischman
  usenet@fischman.org