Re: some mail annoyances [renumbering]

[David Hedbor <david@hedbor.org>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE writes:

> David Hedbor <david@hedbor.org> writes:
> 
>   > [...] This has of course been discussed many times before but I
>   > have yet to understand why gnus can't check how many messages
>   > there REALLY are in a mail group. How hard can that really be?
>   > [...]
> 
> It is not hard, but slow.  Use nnmh as your mail backend and you will
> see just *how* slow.  (With nnmh, Gnus looks for the exact number of
> messages in a group because nnmh does not have these nifty .overview
> files.  I think.)

Why not simply check the number of entries in the overview files? Or
add a second file that keeps the number of articles cached. I can't
possibly see how this can be slow for nnml. If you don't want to count 
lines, isn't there a getdir function? I mean, in Pike I could do
[ sizeof(get_dir(".")) ]. That takes 10-20 ms on a dir with 3000 files 
in it. wc -l on the .overview file in that directory takes 0.006
seconds. Another option would be to add a first line with num articles 
to the .overview files.

In any case, I still can't see how it would be either hard or slow,
unless emacs is very bad at the above operations (I don't know enough
elisp to try). It would of course be an nnml specific solution (well,
should work with nnmh too possibly). 

-- 
[ Below is a random fortune, which is unrelated to the above message. ]
I didn't believe in reincarnation in any of my other lives.  I don't see why
I should have to believe in it in this one.
		-- Strange de Jim