Size of Gnus and Emacs (was: Re: Gnus state, feed commands)

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> I've got %y, which is unread and unticked.
>
> I finally went and looked it up: unseen means the
> message has never before been displayed in a summary
> buffer, or seen by gnus or you.  Unread means you
> just haven't read it. In my case, while
> experimenting, I had removed the read mark from three
> messages in gmane.emacs.help, then tested from the
> *Group* buffer. That meant those message were "seen"
> but "unread", hence the discrepancy.

Great! We should be private investigators!

Off-topic Gnus note: In the Gnus manual section on
daemons [1], I read

> Gnus, being larger than any program ever written
> (allegedly) ...

So, we just have to keep this up every day, and we will
have covered most of Gnus by the time we retire!

What they are saying is: Gnus, a module of Emacs, is
bigger than Emacs, excluding all modules on the same
level as Gnus (?). Which are those? Rmail and W3M? Or
even Dired? Because it would seem illogical that Gnus
is bigger than Emacs, including Gnus.

But could Gnus be bigger than the Linux kernel? Perhaps
if you exclude all the drivers (?). What about Windows?
And what about all those programs written in assembly
languages (with typically several lines just to carry
out branching or arithmetics)? I take it Gnus is
written in Lisp with possibly some C - on the one hand,
those languages don't make for very long programs. On
the other hand, it is so enjoyable to extend with Elisp
so probably lots of people did it, a lot. I don't know!
Can it be true?

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Daemons.html

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573