Re: gnus and imap

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:46:05 +0200 David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> wrote: 

DE> Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> writes:
>> I have not yet taken the time to see if they available source code
>> explains why this is, or if it can be fixed, but the UID space is
>> *definitely* non-contiguous in Zimbra.

DE> Thanks for your explanation. While this behavior of Zimbra might be
DE> peculiar, it's in accordance with the IMAP RFC, which only demands UIDs
DE> to be unique and ascending. So I'm afraid it is Gnus which will have to
DE> be fixed here, which - being originally only a nntp client - still
DE> assumes that article numbers are more or less contiguous.

I would appreciate a quick primer:

What elements of the Gnus data formats enforce this assumption currently?

What backend functions make this assumption?  Which functions outside
the backends have knowledge of the data format internals?

Thanks
Ted