num_entries should not apply to category views

I'd like to propose that the num_entries config variable should only
apply to the front page of a blog, i.e. /pyblosxom.cgi and not also to
category paths like pyblosxom.cgi/computers/operating_systems/ as it
currently does. I just don't see the usefulness of being able to read
the first num_entries posts of a given category but not the rest, and I
think viewers will naturally take the posts shown to be the full content
of the category. I think that blogs would be much quicker and easier to
navigate if category paths showed all entries of the specified category,
just like time-based paths show all entries matching the specified time,
and this behaviour also seems to fit better with the blosxom philosophy
(of behaving like the file system).

This way, you could create an 'archive' flavour that renders only the
title of each post and not the content, and apply that flavour to all
the year and category paths. Then with the pyarchives and pycategories
plugins in your sidebar, users would be able to quickly browse the
archives of your blog by category or by time. This is the approach used
by nanoblogger, for example, and a quick browse of the nanoblogger site
shows how pleasant it is to be able to quickly see what is there and
navigate to it, without needing to scroll through the full content of
all the posts.

I notice that blosxom follows this behaviour
<http://www.blosxom.com/documentation/users/view.html> and I think that
pyblosxom also used to do so. Why was it changed?

It seems to me that the wbgpager and wbgarchives plugins are effectively
workarounds for this num_entries issue, to allow the user to browse to
all entries without having to hack the URL. But it would work better and
be more elegant if num_entries simply did not apply to category paths,
and these plugins were not needed.

If a num_entries behaviour was really wanted for category views, though
I don't understand why, perhaps an additional variable
num_entries_categories could be used instead?



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