Re: How many articles to read...?

[Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com>]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> wrote:

> Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com> writes:
> > Is it a bug or a feature? 
> 
> Depends on how you look at it.  For precision, it's a bug.  For
> simplicity, it's a feature.

Yes, I see your point.

> > I mean, I don't really care about the articles' numbers and have no
> > way to control them, why doesn't gnus show e.g. the number of
> > entires (lines?) in the .overview file instead? 
> 
> Because that can be very, very expensive.
> 
> Consider Gnus as a newsreader.  (Mail handling is just Gnus looking at
> something news-like while stoned on really bad crack.)

Is it really so? Agreeing with your other points, I don't think you're
exactly right saying that gnus is primarily a newsreader. Ok, I know
that that's what it's called. Still, of all the people using gnus, how
many do you think use it for news only, using something else for mail?
Probably a lot, but I think another "a lot" uses it for both... if for
no other reason than to not having to learn all the keys, shortcuts
and quirks of another program. And as a matter of fact it *is* a very
nice mail reader.

Anyway, you're right in saying that it is natural for gnus to simply
subtract the article numbers to get at that figure it asks about. 

<snip>

> So you learn to live with mail groups' counts being wrong, or...
> 
> > Can this behavior somehow be changed without seeting the limit to
> > INT_MAX?
> 
> - Enter the group now mistakenly perceived as having too many articles.
> - Process-mark the whole set.
> - `B m' to move them all to the same group.
> 
> The resulting article range will be contiguous and relatively narrow.

Many thanks for the tip.

-- 
Cheers,
-Dima.