Re: Being forced to deal with message numbers and frustrated

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

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* Tony Lam <Tony.Lam+ding@eng.sun.com>  on Wed, 23 Jun 1999
| I never want to care about article numbers in the first place. Gnus
| could have transparently hide those numbers from user completely, or
| at least provide some satisfactory working solution that can be
| automated to deal with these situations, and there would be no
| problems from user regarding article numbers.

Point: Gnus *DOES* hide those numbers completely (if you tell it not to
display article numbers in the summary buffers).  In the ~5 years I have
been using Gnus, I have never looked at article numbers outside of writing
code that deals with messages on an article number basis, that being my
grafting of Gnus' early expiry code to GNUS and FSF Emacs 18, making early
versions of Gnus play nicely with jka-compr and compressed nnml files, and
some procmail support (the nnmail-keep-last-article stuff).

Admittedly, you are using cache and tick in a fashion that is more complex
than it needs to be (read: wrong :).  I think you would be happier doing
this:

* Use ticks (! or u) to mark articles that you wish to reply to later.

* Use mark dormant (?) to mark articles that you want to keep around
  forever.

* Set gnus-use-cache based on group name (I use a cond form in
  gnus-select-group-hook to set certain variables based on group name).
  Set it true for remote groups, nil or passive as you would for local
  (mail) groups.
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