nnir, gnus-goto-article and such

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

I have this nifty function that lets me look up an article by
message-id, no matter which of my groups it's in:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun gnus-goto-article (message-id)
  (with-current-buffer
      (get-buffer-create (concat "*goto-article " message-id "*"))
    (erase-buffer)
    ;; insert dummy article
    (insert (format "From nobody Tue Sep 13 22:05:34 2011\n\n"))
    (gnus-group-read-ephemeral-group 
     message-id
     `(nndoc ,message-id 
             (nndoc-address ,(current-buffer)) 
             (nndoc-article-type mbox))
     'activate 
     (not    'quit-config) 
     (not    'request-only) 
     '(-1) ; 'select-articles
     (not    'parameters)
     0     ; ' number
     )
    (gnus-summary-refer-article message-id)))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Now there are just two problems with this: 

1. (very minor): if I do `/ o' in the resulting buffer, I see the dummy
   article, which is needed if I want to activate the group.  How can I
   remove it from the group after activation?

2. (important) I'd like to see the whole thread (e.g. with `A T').  That
   works fine if it's an IMAP article because nnir finds it.  However,
   nnir doesn't work on nntp newsgroups.

   It seems to me what's missing is some way of recording the source of
   the message retrieved by gnus-summary-refer-article, and some way of
   asking for a thread search in an nntp server.  Ideas?

TIA,

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com