Re: mh backend

[Justin Sheehy <justin@linus.mitre.org>]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii, Size: 2674 bytes --]

François Pinard <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Maybe (just hypothesising :-) because you often need to look at these
> numbers.  If you stopped having this need, probably the need to repack
> would disappear as well?

As far as I can see, there is only one reason why one would ever need
to pack the messages in a Gnus group.  When the article numbers become
very sparse, with relatively few articles spread over a large
numerical range, some Gnus operations become slow.  At this time, one
simply moves all of the articles in that group into the same group,
and the problem is solved.  

One must be careful not to miss dormant or otherwise unseen messages,
or it will do no good.  This should not need to be done very often
except perhaps in extremely high-volume groups.

> Maybe the good approach would to have Gnus count correctly, then?

Count?  Hm.  

For some reason, a lot of people seem to think that the handy little
number in the *Group* buffer is a count of articles, which they then
conclude is incorrect.  It is not incorrect, as it is not a "count" of
articles.  It is simply the difference between the highest and lowest
numbered articles in the group plus one, nothing more.
Coincidentally, this can be generated _much_ more quickly than an
article count and is thus used instead.

If you really want a count of articles there instead, you could
probably manage to write a user-defined specifier.  The information
needed is not readily available and might have to be generated quite
expensively each time this specifier is used.  If you do so, it will
certainly be _much_ slower than the 't' specifier.

Why exactly does everyone need an exact count of all of their groups,
anyway?  That is, how will the knowledge of exactly how many messages
you have change what actions you take?

Phil Humpherys <phumpherys@utah-inter.net> writes:

> Understood.  It's possible that I'd also want to 'comp' from the
> command line once in a while...

What's stopping you?

The only MH things that you shouldn't do if you use nnml are those
which move or delete messages.  Gnus will never know if you comp a
message.

Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@amaunet.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

>   Rajappa> 1. Message sequences.
> 
> Yeah, Gnus only has one sequence -- the process-marked messages.

Between scoring, limiting and process-marking, I've never missed
sequences in Gnus.  (I switched from MH...)

> May I point you to `nnir.el' which will let you search all mails using
> freeWAIS-sf or Glimpse (beware of Glimpse being rather slow).  

Is freeWAIS-sf significantly faster?  If so, I may stop using glimpse.

-- 
Justin Sheehy

In a cloud bones of steel.