Re: Being forced to deal with message numbers and frustrated

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Tony Lam <Tony.Lam+ding@Eng.Sun.COM> writes:

>     When I tell Gnus to read read 300 messages from foo.v, does Gnus
>     read 100 from each component group or just read the 300 messages
>     with highest number from the virtual group? 

There's clever code in nnvirtual.el (by David Moore) that tries to
distribute the component articles uniformly over the, er, virtual
space.  Or something.

To take an example:  If there are 100 articles in group a, 100
articles in group b, and 200 articles in group c, the component
articles are spread kinda like this in the virtual group space:

a.1
c.1
b.1
c.2
a.2
c.3
b.2
c.4
...

So when you request the newest 200 articles from a virtual group, you
will get the 300 last article numbers in this sequence, which will
contain 50 articles from group a, 50 articles from group b, and 100
articles from group c.

I think David must be a matematician or something.  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen