Re: Can't process mark all articles in summary

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

Aloha,

Figured it out but the fix doesn't seem to be easy.

Turns out nothing to do with IMAP, everything to do with my use of
gnus-summary-prepare-hook, in which I call a function that compacts the
lines in the summary buffer.

The docs (in gnus-sum.el) call this "A hook called after the summary
buffer has been generated.  If you want to modify the summary buffer,
you can use this hook."

So I did. But the problem is that gnus-newsgroup-data has already been
computed (from within functions called earlier by gnus-summary-prepare),
and that data structure saves buffer locations for members of
threads. Unfortunately modifying the summary lines in my 'hooked'
function invalidates the location of some of those saved buffer locations.

To make a long story (not all that) short, I did a lot of tracing and
found that gnus at times, but not always, positions to the wrong place
in the summary buffer after doing things like setting the process mark
(among other actions). Interestingly, the correct article number is
pushed onto the 'processable' list, but the wrong article might get
visually marked because of the wrong mark location, and sometimes this
just causes gnus to stop marking (if you're doing a series, like trying
to mark the whole buffer).

The solution would be to regenerate gnus-newsgroup-data AFTER calling
the gnus-summary-prepare-hook. But I can't see how to easily do that.

Is this truly a bug? I'd humbly suggest that it is, at least based on
the docstring for gnus-summary-prepare-hook, which invites you to monkey
with the summary buffer.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i
* Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *