Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!shelby!csli!cwitty
From: cwitty@csli.Stanford.EDU (Carl Witty)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Gnews loses track of articles less than 1000
Message-ID: <8344@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 1 Apr 89 00:16:39 GMT
References: <8903281229.AA26172@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Sender: cwitty@csli.Stanford.EDU (Carl Witty)
Reply-To: cwitty@csli.Stanford.EDU (Carl Witty)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 72
In-reply-to: gnulists@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU

In article <8903281229.AA26172@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu>, gnulists@WHEATIES writes:
>
>   Has anybody run into a problem with Gnews when the
>   article numbers go over 1000? It seems to lose track of
>   all the articles less than 1000 whether you've read them
>   or not. On our system, the number of articles in
>   comp.emacs just went over 1000 and here's what I found:
...
>   Incidently, this may have happened when we hit 100 
>   and I just didn't notice. And if that theory's true, 
>   the bug won't surface again for comp.emacs until we 
>   hit 10000...?
That's right.

>   Could it be some problem that exists only for Gnews
>   running in spool (non-nntp) mode?
That's right.

>Eric Boutilier               UUCP: uunet!fed!m1edb00
>(202) 452-2734           INTERNET: m1edb00@fed.frb.gov

I just tracked down this bug, and here's what I found:

The spool code gets the list of articles from "ls", which sorts by
lexicographic order rather than numerically.  At one point in the
code, the variable gnews-spool-group-list holds a list, which might
look like (1000 1001 1002 998 999).  It then calls
(sort gnews-spool-group-list '<), which destructively sorts the list
and returns the sorted list.  However, it does not set
gnews-spool-group-list to this sorted list (given the way lisp works,
it can't.)  Thus gnews-spool-group-list becomes (1000 1001 1002).

To fix this, find gnews-spool-exec-group in Spool.el, and change the
line (sort gnews-spool-group-list '<) to
(setq gnews-spool-group-list (sort gnews-spool-group-list '<)).

I've included the modified version of gnews-spool-exec-group after my
signature.

Carl Witty
cwitty@csli.Stanford.EDU


(defun gnews-spool-exec-group (gp)
  "Fake an NNTP group command."
  (let ((dir (gnews-spool-dir gp)) c f l)
    (if (and (file-readable-p dir)
	     (car (file-attributes dir)))
	(gnews-string-as-buffer "" nil
	  (setq gnews-server-article nil)
	  (setq gnews-server-group gp)
	  (call-process "ls" nil t nil dir)
	  (goto-char 1)
	  (insert "(setq gnews-spool-group-list (gnews-spool-preen '(")
	  (goto-char (point-max))
	  (insert ")))")
	  (eval-current-buffer)
	  (if (null gnews-spool-group-list)
	      (gnews-spool-info "211 0 0 0" gp)	; nothing there
	    (setq gnews-spool-group-list (sort gnews-spool-group-list '<))
	    ;; added setq to line above, 3/31/89, Carl Witty
	    (setq gnews-spool-group-tsil (reverse gnews-spool-group-list))
	    (setq c (length gnews-spool-group-list))
	    (setq f (car gnews-spool-group-list))
	    (setq l (car gnews-spool-group-tsil))
	    (gnews-spool-info "211" c f l gp)
	    t))
      (gnews-spool-info "411 Invalid group name.")
      nil)))
-- 
Carl Witty
cwitty@csli.stanford.edu