gnus: How to clear out the list of dormant articles

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

This has been bothering me for a while. I have been in the habit of
marking articles with the ? mark (gnus-summary-mark-as-dormant) if I am
interested in seeing any followups. Now the number of dormant articles
keeps growing, and growing, until I find myself with the following
scenario (these are actual numbers): There are 8 unread articles in a
group. When I try to enter the group, I get the question "How many
articles from <group> (default 206):" And that is very annoying.

I suppose I could just increase gnus-large-newsgroup (it is now 200),
but what I would really like is a way to remove old articles from the
list of dormant articles. Is there a way to do that?

And no, it does not help to hit the d key on all the dormant articles,
for I don't even get them up in the summary buffer in the first place!
Unless I ask for a ridiculously large number of articles to begin with,
like 10000 or so. And even then, hunting down and killing off the
approximately 200 dormant ones is a chore.

What I'd really like is a way to keep only the last N dormant articles
on the list, and mark the remaining ones as read.

And yes, I have trawled the info files to no avail. If it's there, I am
probably looking in the wrong part.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell