Re: Wrong number of articles from completely read group

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

Hi Lars,

>> If I have a group where all the articles are read and I open it, I get
>> asked how many articles I want to show. The number I'm actually shown is
>> always less than the number I ask for (unless I ask for 1). For example,
>> asking for 2 gives me 1. Asking for 4 gives me three. But it's not
>> always n-1. For example, asking for 20 gives me 16.
>
> Gnus doesn't know what articles exist, so it asks for articles in the
> range of n-x to n.  For IMAP, there's often fewer than x+1 articles in
> that range.

I think that applies to any backend that allows for modifications,
right?  In org-gnus.el, I have this really beatiful snippet to reliably
open a summary buffer at least showing ARTICLE (article number or
message id).

                   ;; articles is 1 and group-opened nil initially
                   (while (and (not group-opened)
                               ;; stop on integer overflows
                               (> articles 0))
                     (setq group-opened (gnus-group-read-group
                                         articles nil group)
                           articles (if (< articles 16)
                                        (1+ articles)
                                      (* articles 2))))
                   (if group-opened
                       (gnus-summary-goto-article article nil t)
                     (message "Couldn't follow gnus link.  %s"
                              "The summary couldn't be opened."))

It works, but is there something better that doesn't rely on some
optional feature (like the registry) and works independently from the
used backend?

Bye,
Tassilo