Re: Showing Complete Active Threads

[Rolleston <Nemo@nullsome.net>]

Tassilo Horn <heimdall@uni-koblenz.de> writes:

> Rolleston <Nemo@nullsome.net> writes:
>
>> Somewhat suboptimal, I'd say, as it seems to often try to receive
>> every available header.
>
> Sorry, I cannot follow you here. What do you mean with that it often
> tries to receive every available header?

It attempts to download every header it can from the news server. Try that
on 'alt.test' and you'll begin to see why (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers t)
is a bad idea. :) 

>>   M-u
>>   M-: (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers t)
>>
>> We leap out of the summary buffer, and dive back in again:
>>
>>   O 08 Mar 06:07 Showing Complete Active Threads Rolleston
>>     08 Mar 08:38 \->  Tassilo Horn
>>
>> Hmmph! What's going on here?
>
> Isn't that the behaviour you were looking for?

Well, yes, but without downloading every header (in some cases). Of course,
using a value of 1000 rather than, say, t, will mean that some old threads
may be loose, but most of the recent ones should be fine.

> BTW: I use
>
>      (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers 'some)
>
> which fetches only those old headers needed to prevent loose threads
> (all old headers till a common parent article is found). That's more
> concise and expresses this thread's structure as well.

Sounds good. If only it worked! :) 

Let's try it:

  08 Mar 19:43 Re: Showing Complete Active Threads Tassilo Horn

Once again, just the header for the last article in the thread. 

I've beenrummaging around in Google Groups again, and found this:

http://tinyurl.com/lects

I'm beginning to wonder if the gnus-fetch-old-headers option is fundamentally
broken, and has been so for years.

Ok, how about another approach?

Perhaps I could just download, say, the most recent 200 headers each time a group 
is entered, scoring the active threads in such a way that they are most prominent. 

I think scores will help here, but I'm not completely sure. There's quite a bit 
about scores in the manual, but I can't seem to find a section that describes how 
scores are used or why they are important. It would be rather strange to go to so 
much trouble talking about scores without saying what they can be used for, so 
perhaps I'm missing something completely obvious amongst the 457 manual pages.

Am I?

Your help is much appreciated. Thanks again,

R.