Re: Question about article identification and backends.

[kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann)]

Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:

> I think you may be referring to the main thing I'm wondering about --
> how difficult would it be for Gnus to change such that it doesn't
> require all of the following:
>
>   A few remarks about these article numbers might be useful.  First of
>   all, the numbers are positive integers.  Secondly, it is normally
>   not possible for later articles to `re-use' older article numbers
>   without confusing Gnus.  That is, if a group has ever contained a
>   message numbered 42, then no other message may get that number, or
>   Gnus will get mightily confused.(1) Third, article numbers must be
>   assigned in order of arrival in the group; this is not necessarily
>   the same as the date of the message.
>
> i.e. how reasonable might it be, and how difficult the task to change
> Gnus to rely on stable unique article ids (global ones -- or at least
> global within a backend) rather than stable unique per-group integers?

I guess it might not be that difficult.  It seems that the current
problem is: say you have read all of the articles in a certain group,
that is, articles 1 through 100.  Now you move an article numbered 42
into that group.  It is unread.  Then Gnus will think it is read.

But it ought to be possible to tweak Gnus so that it just splits the
read sequence from 1-100 into 1-41,43-100.

Maybe it is even possible using the backend interface: the backend
could tell Gnus the new list 1-41,43-100 of read articles.
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