Re: Please help me renumber articles !

[Aharon Schkolnik <aharon@health.gov.il>]

>>>>> "David" == David Moore <dmoore@UCSD.EDU> writes:

    David> Aharon Schkolnik <aharon@health.gov.il> writes:
    >> After a while, exiting a group gets slow. In the past, I was
    >> told that this is because of the large range of article numbers
    >> in the group - caused by ticked articles. I was told that the
    >> thing to do is to copy all the articles from the group to
    >> itself. That is what I did - using #, and G M. Everything goes
    >> fine, but it doesn't solve the problem. Here are the group
    >> parameters before and after:

    David> 	If you want all of the numbers back to 1, you can go
    David> into the group with `C-u SPC', turn off threading with `T
    David> T', sort the articles in a reasonable order `C-c C-s C-n'
    David> then using `C-u ### B m' refile everything into a _new_
    David> group (where ### is large enough to cover all of the
    David> articles).  Then you can go and rename & remove the
    David> original group, and then rename the new group to the old
    David> name.


I don't know why it is necessary to turn off threading, and to sort
the articles. I skipped this step. I moved all the articles to a
temporary group (B m), renamed the original to something else, and
then renamed the temporary group to the original name - worked
fine. However, I was wondering if it would be possible to DELETE the
original after moving all the articles out of it, and then rename the
temporary group to the original name ? I guess the question is: is
there a way to DELETE a group ? (not just change its level)


    David> 	If you just want the group compacted, but not starting
    David> at article number 1, you can just refile into the same
    David> group rather than a new one.


Would that speed up the expiration ? I think it still would leave one
big hole - no ?


    David> 	Oh, and if you use the cache, be careful that
    David> everything works right.  I think I've noticed that renaming
    David> a group doesn't always rename the cache.


_YES_ - it seems I had accidently cached an article in one of my mail
groups - that screws up the whole thing ! It seems that when you
rename your temporary group back to the original name, it finds the
cached article, and incorporates it. This can cause a large hole. I
think this may be considered a bug - I guess renaming a group should
rename its cache.


    David> Anyone have better thoughts on this?  Considering how slow
    David> total-expire currently gets with groups with lots of holes,
    David> maybe a safe compaction routine should be added to Gnus
    David> itself.


Yes Yes Yes. Please Please Please. I spend far too much time
compacting my groups (or alternately waiting for the expiration
process on groups with lots of holes). 


-- 
  The day is short, and the work is great,     |   Aharon Schkolnik
  and the laborers are lazy, and the reward    |   Aharon@Health.Gov.IL
  is great, and the Master of the house is     |
  impatient. - Ethics Of The Fathers Ch. 2     |