Re: Exact article count for nnml groups

[Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com>]

David Hanak <dhanak@isis.vanderbilt.edu> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Here's a patch I submitted last June which allows the group buffer to show
> exact article counts for nnml groups instead of the estimate based on the
> difference of the greatest and smallest article numbers.  Kai then helped
> me to improve it a bit, and then suggested to wait until the feature freeze
> is over.  I guess it is over now, and it would be nice if it could be
> integrated into No Gnus.  (I have all the paperwork done.)
>
> It is fairly simple, and perhaps a little bit out of date (after all, the
> lisp files I patched were probably modified since then), but since they're
> only additions, it shouldn't be too hard to merge them.  Also, if anyone
> writes functions to retrieve the list of existing article numbers for any
> other backend than nnml, i.e., nnimap, then it should be able to display
> exact article counts for those backends, too.

David,
I suspect that, since your proposing changing the back-end API,
everyone is waiting to see how Lars responds to your proposal.

There are a few points that I'd like to see addressed.

* I'm not really happy with the use of a regexp to select groups.
  Your gnus-get-group-articles-list is making calls to the backend
  (i.e. server-specific code).  Shouldn't the on/off switch be in the
  server's method?

* The gnus-get-group-articles-list, gnsu-parse-group-articles-list
  aren't specific to the summary.  They should be put in gnus-int.

* I don't find the name gnus-get-group-articles-list nor its
  description that informative.  From its use, and your text, I would
  say that you are returning the list of active articles.  That got me
  thinking that the name should be something like
  gnus-get-active-articles.

* The previous points had me looking in gnus-int where I found
  gnus-request-group-articles.  Your new backend
  'get-group-articles-list is simply the existing
  'request-group-articles returning the articles as a list rather than
  in a buffer.  From looking at your implementation, I can see why you
  want to do this as it certainly optimizes the API for nnml.
  However, I don't think that that is the proper way to approach the
  problem.  You should either use the existing 'request-group-articles
  function, even if it is inefficient for nnml, or start a separate
  thread to discuss updating 'request-group-articles to return a list
  rather than a buffer.

* From what I can see, there's only one call to your new code and
  that's in gnus-articles-to-read.  Are you sure that this one
  function in gnus-sum is all that is necessary to change the article
  counts in the GROUP buffer? Also, which article count are you trying
  to correct? By my reading, the group buffer can display eight
  different counts for each group.

Kevin