Re: How many articles do you want to ...?

[Francis Moreau]

On Sep 15, 8:10 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Merciadri Luca <Luca.Mercia...@student.ulg.ac.be> writes:
> > Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> >> On Sep 6, 2:32 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Merciadri Luca <Luca.Mercia...@student.ulg.ac.be> writes:
> >>> > Hello,
>
> >>> > When fetching threads of a given Usenet group, Gnus *always* asks me
> >>> > how many articles I want to fetch. I think that it is unuseful, as I
> >>> > have some groups where I want to dowload (the last) 2000 threads, and, 
> >>> > on
> >>> > another thread, I want only the 5 (last) threads.
>
> >>> > How can I manage to make Gnus keeping trace of how much threads I want
> >>> > to fetch in a given Usenet group? If it is impossible to make this
> >>> > number varying, depending upon the group, how can I configure Gnus so
> >>> > it always fetch x threads without asking me how much?
> >>> > If it is still impossible, how can I ask Gnus to use a default value
> >>> > about the numbers of threads which need to be downloaded, whatever the
> >>> > group?
>
> >>> > Thanks.
>
> >>> You could start by looking up
>
> >>>       gnus-large-newsgroup
>
> >> Well, this is not exactly what the OP wants AFAIK.
> > You are right.
>
> >> Setting gnus-large-newsgroup to 2000 (for example) just means that if
> >> the a news group has less than 2000 articles then gnus won't prompt
> >> the user otherwise it will.
> > Ok. I didn't know that.
>
> Did you not try it? It solves most fetch problems since I would maybe
> think most people think in terms of fetching unread posts and not
> threads (since a thread is a collection of read and unread posts/mails).
>

Well, if you're subscribed to very busy news groups (> 1000 posts per
day), it's hard to read all of them. So you may end up with gnus
asking this with such groups :

     How many articles from gmane.linux.kernel (default 883053):

What sane value would you put to 'gnus-large-newsgroup' for such
cases ?

>
>
> >> But the question is rather (as I understand it): is it possible to
> >> make gnus _always_ fetch 2000 articles at most whatever the number of
> >> article avalaible on the server side? That is if there're 100 articles
> >> then fetch 100 articles, but if there're 4034 articles then just fetch
> >> the 2000 last ones.
> > For sure. That is my question.
>
> Its one press of enter isn't it after the large group prompt?
>
> If that really is so inconvenient you can "C-u 3000 RET" to enter the
> group and fetch the last 3000.

yes it is, otherwise 'gnus-large-newsgroup' wouldn't exist.

thanks