Extensions of covariantly finite subcategories

Gentle and Todorov proved that in an abelian category with enough projective objects, the extension subcategory of two covariantly finite subcategories is covariantly finite. We give an example to show that Gentle–Todorov’s theorem may fail in an arbitrary abelian category; however we prove a triangulated version of Gentle–Todorov’s theorem which holds for arbitrary triangulated categories; we apply Gentle–Todorov’s theorem to obtain short proofs of a classical result by Ringel and a recent result by Krause and Solberg. This project is partially supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No.s 20070420125 and 200801230). The author also gratefully acknowledges the support of K. C. Wong Education Foundation, Hong Kong.