offline agent troubles

offline agent troubles

[Giorgos Keramidas]

Hi all,

I'm using Gnus 5.11 from the CVS HEAD branch of Emacs, and it seems that
some time during the summer my offline agent started misbehaving.  In
this case 'misbehavior' is that:

  * I fire up Gnus in offline mode.

  * I go into online mode, with `J j'

  * I fetch the new article lists with `g' in the group buffer.

  * I start fetching the article headers and bodies, with `J j', while
    still in online mode.

  * Gnus fetches several hundred KB of text.

  * I go into offline mode again.

At this point there are several new articles which my agent has
supposedly fetched for offline reading, but all the `new' articles seem
unfetched and get tagged with `%' when I try to open them.

A second agent run, i.e. with `J j' and then `M-x gnus-agent-batch'
refetches the articles, and then they are indeed available in offline
mode too.

How can I try to find out whythe first agent run seems to download
articles but then wants to refetch them?

- Giorgos

Re: offline agent troubles

[Simon Josefsson]

Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm using Gnus 5.11 from the CVS HEAD branch of Emacs, and it seems that
> some time during the summer my offline agent started misbehaving.  In
> this case 'misbehavior' is that:
>
>   * I fire up Gnus in offline mode.
>
>   * I go into online mode, with `J j'
>
>   * I fetch the new article lists with `g' in the group buffer.
>
>   * I start fetching the article headers and bodies, with `J j', while
>     still in online mode.
>
>   * Gnus fetches several hundred KB of text.
>
>   * I go into offline mode again.
>
> At this point there are several new articles which my agent has
> supposedly fetched for offline reading, but all the `new' articles seem
> unfetched and get tagged with `%' when I try to open them.
>
> A second agent run, i.e. with `J j' and then `M-x gnus-agent-batch'
> refetches the articles, and then they are indeed available in offline
> mode too.
>
> How can I try to find out whythe first agent run seems to download
> articles but then wants to refetch them?

The default agent predicate is not 'true'.  Have you changed it?  If you
really want all articles to be downloaded, do 'J c' from the *Group*
buffer and press 'e' on default and change the predicate.

Just an idea.

FWIW, I think the default agent predicate should be 'true'.  Most people
have bandwidth enough to download everything.

Re: offline agent troubles

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-08-29 15:20, Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
>Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:
>>   * I fire up Gnus in offline mode.
>>
>>   * I go into online mode, with `J j'
>>
>>   * I fetch the new article lists with `g' in the group buffer.
>>
>>   * I start fetching the article headers and bodies, with `J j', while
>>     still in online mode.
>>
>>   * Gnus fetches several hundred KB of text.
>>
>>   * I go into offline mode again.
>>
>> At this point there are several new articles which my agent has
>> supposedly fetched for offline reading, but all the `new' articles seem
>> unfetched and get tagged with `%' when I try to open them.
>>
>> A second agent run, i.e. with `J j' and then `M-x gnus-agent-batch'
>> refetches the articles, and then they are indeed available in offline
>> mode too.
>>
>> How can I try to find out why the first agent run seems to download
>> articles but then wants to refetch them?
>
> The default agent predicate is not 'true'.  Have you changed it?  If you
> really want all articles to be downloaded, do 'J c' from the *Group*
> buffer and press 'e' on default and change the predicate.

Excellent idea.  That was it, of course.

I tried agent categories a week ago, and this is when things started
working as I described above.  There's an unrelated minor bug in the
customization buffer code of agent-categories in Emacs' CVS HEAD,
but manually editing the predicate with 'p' in the category buffer
was the fix of downloading everything for me :-)

Many thanks,
Giorgos