From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/22040 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Karl Kleinpaste Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: How many articles to read...? Date: 24 Mar 1999 16:05:30 -0500 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035160032 26031 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 00:27:12 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 00:27:12 +0000 (UTC) Keywords: articles,mail,group,gnus,overview,news,file,enter Return-Path: Original-Received: from fisher.math.uh.edu (fisher.math.uh.edu [129.7.128.35]) by sclp3.sclp.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA29180 for ; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:11:12 -0500 (EST) Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu (lists@Sina.HPC.UH.EDU [129.7.3.5]) by fisher.math.uh.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id PAB03208; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 15:06:44 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Wed, 24 Mar 1999 15:06:50 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (root@sclp3.sclp.com [204.252.123.139]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA27947 for ; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 15:06:40 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from beaver.jprc.com (BEAVER.JPRC.COM [207.86.147.217]) by sclp3.sclp.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA28986 for ; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:06:31 -0500 (EST) Original-Received: (from karl@localhost) by beaver.jprc.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id QAA21470; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:05:30 -0500 Original-To: ding@gnus.org X-Face: "5(T0tZd{6}pd~YzBG8O/*EW,.]6]@`m^e;fv65W^Y&=d"M\1H}>T~4_.kcDD.O~y3k)a6h R;Nmi>9|>Nm${2IpM0^RcUEa\jcq?KOP)C&~x51l~zCHTulL^_T|u0I^kB'z@]{`2YjQu In-Reply-To: Dmitry Yaitskov's message of "24 Mar 1999 15:27:41 -0500" Original-Lines: 44 User-Agent: Gnus/5.07008 (Pterodactyl Gnus v0.80) XEmacs/21.2(beta13) (Demeter) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:22040 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:22040 Dmitry Yaitskov 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. > 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.) You enter a group, and Gnus picks up the active file's concept of lowest- and highest-numbered article. What's the simplest conception that can be provided as to how many articles are probably there? Simply subtract, of course. The delta is "close," in the usual (news) case, where articles arrive sequentially, and (usually) are deleted off the low end in large batches during expiry runs, leaving no article numbering holes. Now come to mail, where we have massive amounts of peculiar control that isn't typical of a news system. We move articles around, copy them, delete them, all of these things knocking around the limits in the mail active file. What's Gnus to do? Start reading the entirety of every .overview it runs into? That's an awful lot of wasted I/O, and a lot of wasted time spent counting lines, considering how few entries from the typical .overview are really relevant during any given arrival in either a news or mail group. I have nnml groups with 4000 articles in them -- I do not want multi-megabyte .overviews being read, every time I enter the group. 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.