Re: Correct ordering of items in mail threads

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Pankaj Jangid <pankaj@codeisgreat.org> writes:

> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> On Saturday, 21 Oct 2023 at 10:41, Pankaj Jangid wrote:
>>>  ;; Threading
>>>  '(gnus-thread-sort-functions
>>>    '(gnus-thread-sort-by-number))
>>>  '(gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
>>>    'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)
>>>
>>
>> I have
>>
>> (setq gnus-sort-gathered-threads-function 'gnus-thread-sort-by-date)
>>
>> along with similar (but slightly different) settings for the variables
>> you've set.  This variable says how to sort *within* a thread which may
>> be what you are looking for.
>
> In fact, I wanted to use 'gnus-thread-sort-by-date for
> gnus-thread-sort-functions. But the docstring discouraged me.
>
> Also note that sorting by date is often much slower than sorting by
> number, and the sorting order is very similar.  (Sorting by date means
> sorting by the time the message was sent, sorting by number means
> sorting by arrival time.)

I think this is the trade-off, though -- sorting by number _usually_
means sorting by arrival time, but there's no contract there. It's
entirely possible for messages to arrive out-of-order, and when they do,
you get a weird display. I think a lot of what was slow in Gnus is
gradually becoming less slow (with things like native compilation and
whatnot) and you might try sorting by date and just seeing how bad it is.