Re: Gnus: mark-expirable vs. delete

[bojohan+news@dd.chalmers.se (Johan Bockgård)]

"Joe Casadonte" <jcasadonte@northbound-train.com> writes:

> On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Johan Bockgård wrote:
>>
>> You can delete them explicitly.
>>  [...]
>
> Close, but not quite what I want.  And there's something strange with
> it, too.
>
> What I was looking for was something to mark the message as
> deletable, which I can sort of do with the process mark, but that
> interferes with anything else I may be doing with the process mark.
> It's not as nicely done as `gnus-summary-mark-as-expirable', IMHO. I
> can live with this, though, as I don't often use the process mark
> for other things.

Yes, I have thought about this too. It might be nice to have. I think
Pine does this--you mark messages for deletion and it deletes them
when you exit. We could do something like

(defun gnus-summary-mark-as-deletable (n)
  "Mark next N articles as deletable.
If N is negative, mark backward instead."
  (interactive "p")
  ;; TODO: what MARK (character) should we use?
  (gnus-summary-mark-forward n MARK))

Then add a hook that (asks and then) deletes the marked messages when
you exit summary.

> The strange part kills this option for me, however. When I do
> something like "C-u 200 RET" in the Group window (runs
> `gnus-topic-select-group' or `gnus-group-select-group' with an
> argument of 200), it seems to be counting those now-deleted articles
> as part of the 200, and what I wind up with is some number less than
> 200 (e.g. 200 => 36, 450 => 257). The whole point of this (for me)
> was that when I went back looking for an old email, I didn't have to
> sift through the cruft.

    Question 4.12:
    ..............

    The number of total messages in a group which Gnus displays in
    group buffer is by far to high, especially in mail groups. Is this
    a bug?

    Answer:

    No, that's a matter of design of Gnus, fixing this would mean
    reimplementation of major parts of Gnus' back ends. Gnus thinks
    "highest-article-number - lowest-article-number =
    total-number-of-articles". This works OK for Usenet groups, but if
    you delete and move many messages in mail groups, this fails. To
    cure the symptom, enter the group via `C-u RET' (this makes Gnus
    get all messages), then hit `M P b' to mark all messages and then
    say `B m name.of.group' to move all messages to the group they
    have been in before, they get new message numbers in this process
    and the count is right again (until you delete and move your mail
    to other groups again)."

-- 
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the
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