Re: Why does Gnus article-moving act like a fetch of new news?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> writes:

> On 09 Apr 2021, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>> I think an argument could be made that if the DONT-SCAN optional
>> argument is non-nil, we should also skip running the two
>> get-new-news hooks. But let's see what Lars says. 
>
> You mean the second argument to `gnus-group-get-new-news-this-group'?
>
> The doc string is somewhat confusing on that argument:

Yup, and looking at the code I'm inclined to think that the docs are
just a typo -- don't scan really means don't scan.

>  | gnus-group-get-new-news-this-group is an interactive compiled   |
>    Lisp function in ‘gnus-group.el’.  |  |
>    (gnus-group-get-new-news-this-group &optional N DONT-SCAN) |  |
>    Check for newly arrived news in the current group (and the N-1
>    next groups).  | The difference between N and the number of
>    newsgroup checked is returned.  | If N is negative, this group
>    and the N-1 previous groups will be checked.  | If DONT-SCAN is
>    non-nil, scan non-activated groups as well. In other words, the
>    meaning of "DONT-SCAN" seems to be: scan!  One can see how a person
>   might be confused by this :-).
>
> According to the "Terminology" section in the Gnus manual,
> "activating" a group means this:
>
>  | The act of asking the server for info on a group and computing
>    the | number of unread articles is called “activating the   group”.
>    | Un-activated groups are listed with ‘*’ in the group   buffer.
>    Thus I don't understand why moving an article to a group should
>    unconditionally "activate" that group in the first place.  I can
>    see how moving an *unread* article to a group might activate that
>    group?  But the code in `gnus-summary-move-article' doesn't have
>    such a conditional.
>
> And even if we leave aside the question of why we unconditionally
> activate the destination group, it's still not clear why activating a
> group should imply getting new news for that group. Or, to put it
> another way: why is the way to activate a group to get new news for
> it?  These just seem like two very different things.

Yeah, I'm not sure either!