subscribe to new group with agent

subscribe to new group with agent

[Robert Epprecht]

In April there was a thread in gnu.emacs.gnus (same subject)
about subscribing to huge newsgroups with the Agent. Sometimes
you might want to bypass the download of all the headers if you
intend to catch up after that anyway. 

In <m3vgoo7lfm.fsf.p_oster_2000.yahoo.com@clara.net> "Poster 2000"
sent a piece of code which let's you limit the download to a number
of the most recent messages.  As I have found this code very helpful
I asked him for permission to send his code here. Here it is:

/-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
|  I have had this problem with a couple of large groups I was reading
|  once. I came up with the following which seems to work sometimes.
|  
|  (defun gnus-catchup-limited (offset)
|    "catches up to N in the past"
|    (interactive "p")
|    (setq NAME (gnus-group-group-name))
|    (save-excursion
|      (gnus-group-read-group 1 t NAME)
|      (setq END (- gnus-newsgroup-end offset))
|      (setq START (cdar(nth 2 (gnus-get-info NAME))))
|      (gnus-summary-exit)
|      (setq ITEMS nil)
|      (while (>= END START)
|        (setq ITEMS (cons END ITEMS))
|        (setq END (- END 1)))
|      (gnus-group-make-articles-read NAME ITEMS)))
|  
|  It catches up whatever group is under point to the last N article
|  numbers or it is supposed to. It seems to fail if it can not fetch the
|  first, or is it last article ie C-u 1 RET fails.
|  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------

Couldn't something like this be included in Gnus?

Robert Epprecht