Showing old threads

Showing old threads

[Ian Zimmerman]

I'm running into a problem which is just mildly annoying in its effect,
but maddeningly difficult (for me) to track down.  I should first note
that all my groups are on a nnimap server, the server never expires
anything, and I mostly never manually delete anything either (except for
blatant spam and the like).  I have gnus-fetch-old-headers set to some,
because I like to see the thread context of new articles.  This setup
seems to result in no less than three different behaviors from Gnus,
depending on the particular group.

The first behavior is that when I enter a group from the Group buffer,
Gnus displays all the unread articles in the summary, _plus_ all the
read articles necessary to complete threads.  This is the behavior I
prefer and the one that the documentation seems to imply, although the
documentation is unforgivably vague in this area.

The second behavior is that Gnus only displays unread articles when I
enter a group, but correctly reconstructs the entire thread of the
current article when I do A T (gnus-summary-refer-thread) in the
summary buffer.  I could live with this behavior if it turns out it is
in fact what Gnus is supposed to do, but I won't regain my sleep until I
know why it "sometimes" slips into behavior 1 instead.

And the third and worst behavior is that Gnus not only doesn't display
complete threads of new articles upon group entry, but A T in the group
has no effect.  Curiously, repeatedly doing ^
(gnus-summary-refer-parent-article) works just fine and I can
reconstruct the thread that way at the cost of many more keystrokes.

I have peeked into the overview files (under ~/News/overview/nnimap/)
and the headers of all the articles, including those Gnus refuses to
show, are there.

I am a fairly accomplished Elisp programmer, but trying to follow the
execution thread ('scuse the pun) through gnus-sum.el makes me want to
scream in the middle of the night.

If this is not the right forum to post this (that is, if there's a
specific bug report or development forum for Gnus), please advise.
Thanks and apologies for a relatively long and ranty post.

-- 
Ian Zimmerman
gpg public key: 1024D/C6FF61AD
fingerprint: 66DC D68F 5C1B 4D71 2EE5  BD03 8A00 786C C6FF 61AD
Rule 420: All persons more than eight miles high to leave the court.