Re: Question about article identification and backends.

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> 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.

True, though for my own use, now that I think about it, I'd probably
want at least some of the marks to follow the article, though I
realize there are potentially sticky issues here.  Actually, I might
just prefer to have gnus-summary-move-marking-as and
gnus-summary-copy-marking-as.  With each you would invoke the
function, it would expect a keypress to indicate the mark (?, u, U, d,
etc.) and then it would process the article(s).  You could possibly
also have a gnus-default-group-added-article-mark that would be
initially set to " ".

It'd also be nice to have the ability to say "delete this article from
the current group" *and* "delete this article from all groups".  Come
to think of it we may already have that, but I'd prefer it were keyed
on a unique ID we control, rather than one provided from the outside.

> 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.

I thought one of the problems would still be that if you renumber
articles, some Gnus features like agent? perhaps, get very unhappy
(i.e. break).  They'd have to be keyed on the global article unique ID
(integer or whatever) to fix that.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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