Re: message splitting gone haywire

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:00:16 +0800 Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote: 

EA> Eventually I figured out what was happening -- in the case of a few
EA> regular email threads (newsletters in particular), one earlier issue had
EA> gone into the wrong group, and all subsequent issues went into the same
EA> group. Standard registry behavior, but I had physically moved later
EA> issues into the proper group, and new issues were still getting split
EA> into the wrong group. Eventually I realized that the originally
EA> offending message was still buried back in the wrong group, and once I
EA> rooted out all of them, things went back to normal.

EA> This happened with two or three separate threads (not sure how),
EA> creating the impression that all hell had broken loose with splitting.

EA> I'm not sure what proper behavior should be, but I did expect that
EA> split-with-parent would send new messages to the location of the
EA> newest/nearest parent, and not to where some distant ancestor had once
EA> gone.

Good point.  Well, we build the full list of groups, then we call
`gnus-registry-post-process-groups' on it.  That looks at
`gnus-registry-split-strategy' which is nil by default; the defcustom
says:

  '(choice :tag "Splitting strategy"
           (const :tag "Only use single choices, discard multiple matches" nil)
           (const :tag "Majority of matches wins" majority)
           (const :tag "First found wins"  first))

Have you customized this?  My guess is you have 'first and the first
group in the list was from the oldest reference.

Maybe I should add 'oldest and 'newest strategies...  We have the
article notice dates in the registry.

Ted