Re: What is happening in agentized groups?

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
>
>>> The Agent has a hard coded behaviour not to download read articles.
>>> There was a patch that added a new predicate `read' and changed the
>>> default predicate from short into (and (not read) short) but I
>>> couldn't find a way to make it backwards compatible so I hesitated
>>> about commiting it.  But I'm not sure if readedness is causing your
>>> problem though.
>>>
>> How can I find out?
>
> Do you read anything before downloading it into the Agent?  Then the
> read articles shouldn't be downloaded.  Maybe this has changed, but I
> don't think so (but I haven't really used the agent much for a while).

Oh, yes.  I see.  Read a few plugged, and see if they get downloaded.
My normal routine is to never read when plugged, and almost never go
plugged at all.  I have the downloads run in batch mode by cron.

I don't think reading plugged would be what caused me to have
thousands of those summary marker things.  Only time I read plugged is
by accident, like if I go plugged for some other reason and forget to
go back unplugged. 

>> About that readedness thing; shouldn't the agent just download
>> according to predicate and score, not mindfull of readedness.
>> One might read a message in plugged mode but still want it
>> downloaded.   In fact, I would think that would be pretty much the
>> norm.  I'd prefer the agent not pay attention to what I do when plugged.
>>
>> At the very least, a predicate of `true' should download everthing,
>> regardless. I would think.
>
> Yes, I think I agree.  But that intuition might be counter-obvious if
> you consider nntp, where you usually begin by catching up thoose
> 50,000+ message before starting to follow a newsgroup.  You don't want
> the agent to download all the old junk then.

My usage wouldn't go like that, but it may not be representative.  If
I decide to agentize a group, its usally because I want it on disc for
searching or the like so in most cases, I'd want all the old junk too.

Are there really nntp groups where there could be 50,000 actually on
a server?  The most I've seen was just under 5,000 on comp.os.linux.misc.

At any rate, it couldn't be that hard to have some command that did a
onetime only catchup for the agent.

But back to this business of the undownloaded entries in summary
buffer:  I'm not sure I see what the value of that is.  In my case it
just gives me a huge summary buffer to process if I should happen to
enter the group with C-u.

ShengHuo says its because they are not in .overview, but I wonder why
not. Should they be?  It would seem they should with a predicate of
true and complete turnover on the nntp server.  I'm assuming these
`undownloaded' entries are refering to messages actually on the
server.  Or do they just stay around forever?  If they don't actually
refer to available messages then I really don't see what the value is
with them.

How can I diagnose where they are comming from?  I keep thinking with
a predicate of `true', I shoulld never see them.  At least not after a
month or so when there will have been a turnover on the nntp server.