Re: Why article numbers?

[kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann)]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:
>
>> Yeah.  What I think should happen is a renumbering.  For the cache,
>> renumbering is actually easier, most of the time: just renumber the
>> cached articles to start at 1, and you'll be fine in most cases.
>
> What if there is an article with number 1 on the server?  (But see
> below too.)

That's why I said `in most cases'.  Hm.

Gnus could offset all numbers by the number of cached articles in the
group -- then the backend would have to know about it and it would
have to treat all incoming article numbers appropriately.  Whee...

>> The copies in the agent are a thornier issue.  I think it would not
>> be good to just delete them: they will then be fetched again from the
>> server, which is a waste of bandwidth that we wanted to avoid by
>> using the agent in the first place...
>
> Yes, although that is an optimization.  Deleting them would at least
> make things correct.

Yes.  Hm.  Yeah, why not make it correct and slow first.

One possible optimization would be to find out if the uidvalidity
change actually resulted in different article numbers being used.  I
have the impression that this is often not the case.

>> Maybe the cache should be treated a little bit like a separate
>> backend, kind of like nnvirtual does it, at least conceptually.  I
>> think it would be best to just decouple the numbers used in the cache
>> totally from the numbers used on the server.  This leads to problems
>> when the cached articles are still on the server, but oh, well.
>
> This sounds like a good idea.  So conceptually there is a nncache
> which contains the articles you put into it with `*', and the nncache
> groups mirror all your normal groups.  And when you enter a group it
> is like entering a nnvirtual that contains the nncache group and the
> real group.

That was my idea.

> OTOH it sounds like work, and might expose other unwanted behaviour,
> so I'm not sure if it is worth the time to really implement it like
> this...

Hah, if it wasn't work it'd be implemented already ;-)

-- 
A preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with.