Wrong article count

Wrong article count

[David Sumbler]

I use nnfolder: for my mail groups.  When entering a group, Gnus asks
me how many articles to fetch if there are more than 200 (the
default).

Lately I seem to be getting some odd behaviour, where Gnus says that
there are far more mails than there really are in a group.  For
instance, at the moment if I enter the group nnfolder:inbox, Gnus says
"How many articles from nnfolder:inbox (default 751):".  When I enter
the group, which has (display . all), I see that there are in fact 66
items, including expirable and read mails.  Looking at ~/mail/inbox
seems to suggest that only these 66 articles exist in the file.

'cat ~/Mail/inbox.nov' gives

((expire 505 730 734 738 743 (750 . 751)) (read (1 . 751)) (reply 661
663 670 682 685 707 712 716 728 733 736 739) (tick 731) (save 505))

and doing "G E" on the group gives

("nnfolder:inbox" 1
 ((1 . 751))
 ((seen
   (192 . 751))
  (cache 505)
  (save 505)
  (expire 505 730 734 738 743
          (750 . 751))
  (reply 661 663 670 682 685 707 712 716 728 733 736 739)
  (tick 731))
 "nnfolder:"
 ((gcc-self . t)
  (display . all)
  (visible . t)))

Why is Gnus asking me about articles that no longer exist, and how do
I prevent this behaviour?

David

-- 

David Sumbler

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Re: Wrong article count

[Bastien]

David Sumbler writes:

> Why is Gnus asking me about articles that no longer exist, and how
> do I prevent this behaviour?

I have experienced similar weird behavior in the past.  Maybe try to
update the nnfolder backend in the server buffer (^ g).

-- 
Bastien

Re: Wrong article count

[David Sumbler]

Bastien <bastien@xxx.fr> writes:

> David Sumbler writes:
>
>> Why is Gnus asking me about articles that no longer exist, and how
>> do I prevent this behaviour?
>
> I have experienced similar weird behavior in the past.  Maybe try to
> update the nnfolder backend in the server buffer (^ g).

I have tried this, and it has finished repairing the groups that could
not be entered as a result of me using
gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases etc. earlier, but unfortunately it
hasn't altered the wrong count of the articles in the groups.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.  I wasn't aware of this facility,
and it will undoubtedly be useful in future.

David

-- 

David Sumbler

Please reply with a followup to the newsgroup.

However, if you _really_ want to send me an e-mail,
replace "nospam" in my address with "aeolia".

Re: Wrong Article Count

[Paul Jarc]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) wrote:
> When being asked for the group info, the backend needs to supply
> extra data: the actual number of unread messages.

nnchoke-request-list and nnchoke-request-newgroups provide the high
and low article numbers.  nnchoke-request-group provides those numbers
along with the real article count (as far as the backend knows).
nnchoke-retrieve-groups can provide either format.  Currently, only
nntp and nnmaildir use the nnchoke-request-group format.  I don't know
if Gnus is using -request-list or -request-newgroups to get this
information, or if it's using a function that can provide the
information but then ignores it.

> And then the %y specifier in gnus-group-line-format needs to be
> changed to take advantage of the extra data, if available.

I don't think this is as simple as it sounds.  I'm not very familiar
with the data structures involved (entries in gnus-newsrc-hashtb,
etc.), and they don't seem to be documented anywhere, but it seems to
me like the high and low numbers are stored in a widely-used data
structure, and the count is always computed from there.  Making the
backend's count available to Gnus would mean modifying the form of the
data structure, which means reviewing every piece of code that uses
that data structure.


paul