Re: Being forced to deal with message numbers and frustrated

[nospam2159+ding@daimi.au.dk (Peter von der Ahé - at home)]

>>>>> "TL" == Tony Lam <Tony.Lam+ding@eng.sun.com> writes:

 TL> I never want to care about article numbers in the first
 TL> place. Gnus could have transparently hide those numbers from user
 TL> completely, or at least provide some satisfactory working
 TL> solution that can be automated to deal with these situations, and
 TL> there would be no problems from user regarding article numbers.

>>>>> "Rat" == Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

 Rat> Point: Gnus *DOES* hide those numbers completely (if you tell it
 Rat> not to display article numbers in the summary buffers).

I will not argue that Gnus cannot hide the article numbers completely
from plain sight, but that is not the problem here is it?

To illustrate what the problem, please try doing the following:

(setq gnus-large-newsgroup 2)

in .gnus.el

Create a new nnml group with G m, copy 3 messages to this group.
Mark them all as read.  Delete the article with number 2.  Exit the
group.  Enter the group.  You will now be asked how many articles you
want to see, even though there only is 2 articles in the group.  This
can be very annoying when you have larges mail groups with gaps.

Further more, AFAIK[1], Gnus will consider all messages from the
lowest available number to the highest.  So if you have a group with a
article numbered 1 and the next is numbered 1002, Gnus will have to do
something for 1000 article in between, this may not be much, but will
amount to a hill of beans in the long run.  So for efficiency it would
be perfectly sane to provide some kind of renumbering function.

[1] Once I had problems entering large mailgroups with gaps, because
gnus insisted on stat'ing all nonexistent files from 2 to 1001.  I
think this problem has gone away, and maybe only the numbers from
.overview is used.

Cheers,
Peter