Re: Need suggestions for changing agent's downloadable mark.

[Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com>]

Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:

> Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> writes:
>
>> I could fix this by editing the newsrc file but I'm concerned that any
>> number of people may have the same unrecognized problem.  What I need
>> is a process, either manual or automatic, that cleans up the
>> downloadable marks.
>
> Doesn't the agent already have a feature where it does things with
> articles that aren't on the server anymore?  Maybe it deletes NOV
> lines for those articles?  It could also remove the downloadable mark
> for them.

I believe that you're thinking of gnus-agent-expire.  It's a
possibility.  I was hoping for something more automatic.

> While it is possible to download read articles, and users *might* wish
> to do that, we can be pretty sure that articles that aren't on the
> server any more are really not downloadable anymore ;-)

Well, I wasn't planning to forbid marking read articles.  Especially
as the agent has a flag for marked newly fetched articles as unread
(that does seem to imply that some people fetch read articles).  What
I was thinking of was a good deal more subtle.  That is, you could
mark a read article in the current gnus session and fetch it, but you
could not mark that read article in this gnus session and then fetch
it in a future gnus session. Hmmm... That's probably sufficiently
subtle that people encountering it would call it a bug.

Kevin