can't mark old messages

can't mark old messages

[Brian May]

Hello,

If I find a message, and push A R in order to find its parent...

...everything works fine.

However, if I want to flag one of these 'new' messages with '*'
or '!', Pgnus 0.98 produces an error:

Can't cache article -1

or

Can't mark negative article numbers

(the first message found by A R seems to have ID -1, the next one is -2,
etc - at last thats the message I get by pushing *)

If I exit from the group and load all messages with C-u <enter>, then
everything works as expected.

I don't entirely trust my news-server, so I tried the same thing on
nntp+quimby.gnus.org:gnus.ding

Exactly the same problem occurred.

Any ideas?
-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

Re: can't mark old messages

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Brian May <bam@silas-2.cc.monash.edu.au> writes:

> However, if I want to flag one of these 'new' messages with '*'
> or '!', Pgnus 0.98 produces an error:
> 
> Can't cache article -1
> 
> or
> 
> Can't mark negative article numbers

Yes, this is because Gnus can't mark articles with negative article
numbers.  :-)

When fetching via message-id, Gnus (often) does not know what the
article number of the fetched article is.  And since Gnus keeps track
of article marks via the article number, Gnus can't mark articles that 
it doesn't know the article number of.

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

Re: can't mark old messages

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Lars" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

    Lars> Brian May <bam@silas-2.cc.monash.edu.au> writes:
    >> However, if I want to flag one of these 'new' messages with '*'
    >> or '!', Pgnus 0.98 produces an error:
    >> 
    >> Can't cache article -1
    >> 
    >> or
    >> 
    >> Can't mark negative article numbers

    Lars> Yes, this is because Gnus can't mark articles with negative
    Lars> article numbers.  :-)

    Lars> When fetching via message-id, Gnus (often) does not know
    Lars> what the article number of the fetched article is.  And
    Lars> since Gnus keeps track of article marks via the article
    Lars> number, Gnus can't mark articles that it doesn't know the
    Lars> article number of.

In that case, consider this another feature request:

- gnus *should* know the article number of fetched articles. I admit though,
I don't know what the difficulty is... I know for certain when I do
the same thing under trn, I can mark the newly fetched articles as unread.
I can't with Gnus. I assume from your response that this behaviour
is normal, to be expected, and doesn't indicate a problem with my
configuration?

This allows:
- marking messages
- showing if a retrieved message has already been marked.

I personally find it extremely confusing when I retrieve a message like this,
and the mark (*) is not shown. 

For me, marks should always work regardless of how the article was fetched,
or I end up wasting time just to mark the articles, instead of using them
to save time.

eg: I see a message that looks interesting. I load its parent with A R.
I find I have to leave urgently, so I want it to mark the message to remind
me to read it latter - but it doesn't work!!! Instead, I have to reload
all old articles in the group, try and find this one again, and then
mark it.

The when I find it again, I find that the article was cached anyway, so
I just had to push 'Y c' (not tested) instead reloading it.
-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

Re: can't mark old messages

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Brian May <bam@silas-2.cc.monash.edu.au> writes:

> - gnus *should* know the article number of fetched articles. I admit though,
> I don't know what the difficulty is...

When Gnus can know the article number, it does.
nntp-find-group-and-number even tries to guess the number, but
sometimes the infomation just isn't there.

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