Re: mh backend

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

>>>>> "J" == Justin Sheehy <justin@linus.mitre.org> writes:

J> For some reason, a lot of people seem to think that the handy
J> little number in the *Group* buffer is a count of articles, which
J> they then conclude is incorrect.

Probably because the manual says it's the "estimated total number of
articles" rather than "a useless number dependant on other useless
numbers you don't care about".


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

If you have 50 articles in a group, and it says you have 2000, you'll
have an extra prompt on entry, which could scare you so you don't want
to waste the time and RAM that entering a 2000 msg group would give.
I also seem to remember that somewhere along the line Gnus will
consume much more memory entering a group where it thinks it has lots
of articles than where it knows it has 50.  I've had Gnus run out of
swap on my machine when our newsserver reset article numbers to some
arbitrarily high-value, even though there might have been only 50
articles... Gnus thoughtt there were a few million.

You can't make Gnus count correctly for _this_ instance, but if you
could for mail groups I'm sure things would be much happier.  Just
saying "Move all the messages back into the group" is bad advice,
because as you mentioned, you have to take special care of dormant or
ticked articles, cached articles, etc.  If it's going to mean that
much work for the user, why not fix the program?

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - By consent of the corrupted
Don't read everything you believe.