Re: Shorter/customized group names?

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
> This is pretty cool, but it's also got a few problems.  It relies on
> implementation details of Gnus like the order in which groups get
> formatted, that Gnus always formats *all* the groups (it doesn't) and on
> some secret variables.

It's a hack, for sure. Maybe the reason it works pretty well for me is
because I'm using topic mode?

Regarding the gnus-tmp- variables, I'd say those are unlikely to change
in the future, but they should surely be made "official". The doc-string
for gnus-group-line-format says for '%u'

,----
| The function will be passed a single dummy parameter as argument.  The
| function should return a string, which will be inserted into the
| buffer just like information from any other group specifier.
`----

In the current form, this doesn't make sense, since it is not said how
to obtain the group name and the corresponding method which should be
inserted into the buffer.

>  Also, I'm not sure what resets DE-format-previous-regexp back to nil
> other than encountering a non-nntp group.  

Exactly that.

> Since I'd like this to work for non-nntp groups too, I don't think
> that trick is going to work for me.

I only have nntp groups which are separated by dots, so I tailored it to
nntp only.

> Here's what I've got so far as a tweak to the above, but since it relies
> on the same assumptions, it doesn't quite work as well as it should.
> This seems like the sort of thing for which we would need explicit
> support from Gnus if it's not going to break with each release. 

Yes, maybe this jusn't isn't possibly to do reliably at the moment. I'd
have to look in gnus-group.el in how Gnus builds the Group buffer in
detail.

[... snipped your version ...]

Could you give an example how this code fails for you in certain
situations?

-David