From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/49989 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Why article numbers? Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 13:40:11 -0500 Organization: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt, human pyramid? Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: <841y2jzrgm.fsf@lucy.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1044902417 28567 80.91.224.249 (10 Feb 2003 18:40:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 18:40:17 +0000 (UTC) Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 18iIqa-0007Pw-00 for ; Mon, 10 Feb 2003 19:40:04 +0100 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 18iIrA-0007sf-00; Mon, 10 Feb 2003 12:40:40 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Mon, 10 Feb 2003 12:41:36 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (sclp3.sclp.com [66.230.238.2]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id MAA29724 for ; Mon, 10 Feb 2003 12:41:24 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 57373 invoked by alias); 10 Feb 2003 18:40:19 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 57368 invoked from network); 10 Feb 2003 18:40:19 -0000 Original-Received: from multivac.student.cwru.edu (HELO multivac.cwru.edu) (@129.22.96.25) by 66.230.238.6 with SMTP; 10 Feb 2003 18:40:19 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 13312 invoked by uid 500); 10 Feb 2003 18:40:34 -0000 Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen's message of "Sun, 09 Feb 2003 00:49:52 +0100") Mail-Copies-To: nobody Mail-Followup-To: ding@gnus.org Original-Lines: 28 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090015 (Oort Gnus v0.15) Emacs/21.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:49989 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:49989 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote: > You enter a group. The server says that the available articles are > 50000-60000. You have a list of, er, ids. How many articles should > you fetch if the user wants all unread articles? Don't ask for a particular number of articles. Ask for "all unread articles". Require backends to store marks, so they can figure out which articles are unread. Also note that numbers are still very natural article identifiers for some backends, like nntp. Those backends could continue to use numbers, and could do range compression in their storage. We would only *allow* identifiers to be non-numeric, not require it. The only requirement would be that identifiers must satisfy eq if they are supposed to identify the same article. Then the code that takes advantage of numeric identifiers can be pushed to the other side of the backend interface. It would be a lot of work, but I don't think there any any inherent problems beyond that. > You want to mark the unseen messages as unseen. Keep a list of all > seen ids? nnmaildir already keeps a list of all 'read articles, and would do the same for 'seen if those were passed to the backend (as I think they should be). paul