Gnus, # of headers to retrieve

[* Tong * <sun_tong@users.sourceforge.net>]

Hi, 

I think there might be a bug when Gnus decides how many of news
headers to retrieve. 

When entering a big newsgroup, Gnus will prompt me something like
"number of headers to retrieve". No matter how little I specified,
Gnus will always retrieve the whole list first, then show me the
number of messages I specified, with '{50 (+264714 more)}' showing
on the status bar. 

This does not bother me previously, but currently I'm on a dial up
networking, with the news server happens to carry huge postings. To
give you an idea how big it is:

  375094(  28): comp.os.linux.misc                          (0)
   26844(   5): comp.os.linux.security                      (0)
  264852(   1): comp.os.linux.setup                         (0)
  131964(   5): comp.os.linux.x                             (0)

The headers for comp.os.linux.setup e itself is over 3M, and
retrieving it seems forever for me (;->). What worse is that I have
to pay for those extra downloads that I don't need (and see). :-(

Ok, quite a long bug report but quite an easy fix. Hope the new
version of gnus will issue the xover command according to
gnus-large-newsgroup (or the user specification), to limit the
header download, and not retrieving the whole list.

Thanks

PS. My Gnus comes with RH8:

Gnus v5.9.0
GNU Emacs 21.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
200 Bell Nexxia News Server (Twister v1.2.0)

PPS. A side request,

It'd be quite nice to have some local caching capabilities for dial
up Internet access like me. 

What I was looking in the gnus info manual (but not found) were the
capabilities to cache

- the subscribed newsgroup headers 
- and viewed articles. 

So that they don't need to be retrieved again, once that have been
downlaoded. Surely a proper expiration mechanism is also need for
that. 

thanks 

-- 
Tong (remove underscore(s) to reply)
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