Re: faster gnus-thread-latest-date

[Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca>]

Dave Love <fx@gnu.org> writes:

> I don't know from where this was Cc'd, as I only got the Cc address
> without a To.

Sorry, it's from ding@gnus.org, which I read via
gmane.emacs.gnus.general.  That might have been put in the Newsgroups
header, but I understand why that might have been confusing.  This post
is the same.

> Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:
>
>> Here's another patch that I think should be applied.  When parsing a
>> date, it first tries parse-time-string, and only falls back to using
>> timezone-make-date-arpa-standard if parse-time-string gives an error.
>> This is about 4 times faster in my tests with good dates, and shaves
>> 0.6s off of opening a summary buffer with 6000 articles.  I've cc'd 
>> Dave Love since I believe he introduced this.  If he can confirm that
>> the problematic dates he encountered triggered an error in
>> parse-time-string, then this patch should be ok.
>
> The comment says that parse-time-string can produce bogus results rather
> than fail.  I vaguely remember this was about getting silly results from
> two-digit dates around the millennium -- returning the epoch, I guess --
> but I don't know for sure.

Well, I guess we shouldn't apply the date-to-time patch then, although
it would be better if we really knew what the problem was and could fix
it without slowing things down by a factor of 4.

On the other hand, if the caching patch gets applied, then it shouldn't
matter too much in practise.  (The 0.6s above is with the caching patch
applied; the time difference would be *much* larger without the caching
patch.)

Dan