Re: Reverse thread sorting by most recent number

[Christoph Groth]

Christoph Groth wrote:

> I have set gnus-thread-sort-functions to
> '(gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number) and this works as it should.
>
> Now I would like to reverse the sorting order so that the order of
> threads is consistent with the chronological order of messages within
> a thread.

I managed to solve the problem myself and reply here for reference.  It
turns out that the threads that were sorted incorrectly were those with
missing messages.

For

(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
      '(gnus-thread-sort-by-number
        (not gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number)))

to work, i.e. for chronological sorting of threads according to the most
recent article, I also need to enable sparse threads:

(setq gnus-build-sparse-threads 'more)

Otherwise, the determination of the most recent number seems to be
hindered by missing articles.  However, if
gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number is not reversed, it seems to work
also without sparse threads.

After 20 years of using Gnus I'm still amazed how cool it is and how
arcane...

I guess that this problem would deserve being "fixed" in some way
(i.e. by clarifying documentation).  Should I write to the emacs-devel
mailing list?  Or is this issue not important enough?

Christoph