bug#72949: Gnus sometimes reports new messages but not showing them on IMAP server

[James Thomas via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Dan Christensen wrote:

> On Sep 15, 2024, James Thomas <jimjoe@gmx.net> wrote:
>
>> Dan Christensen wrote:
>>
>>>   (max (1+ (- (cdr active) (car active))) 0)
>>
>> Just wanna chime in with what's in (info "(gnus) Required Back End
>> Functions"):
>>
>>   Gnus just discards the total-number, so whether one should take the
>>   bother to generate it properly (if that is a problem) is left as an
>>   exercise to the reader.
>
> That's interesting.  I wonder if it is still correct.
>
> As I mentioned in an earlier message in this bug report, without that
> line of the patch, Gnus gives me an error.  Without that line, Gnus
> would calculate the total number of articles as -1, and this line
> from gnus-start.el would fail to match because of the minus sign:
>
>     (when (looking-at "[0-9]+ [0-9]+ \\([0-9]+\\) [0-9]+")

Of course, a non-numeric character would still be wanton.

> I see that many other parts of Gnus do a correct calculation of the
> total number of articles

Wrt this function? Maybe they didn't realize this. :-)

Regards,
James