using the agent default category

using the agent default category

[lconrad]

In the course of getting the agent to more or less work, I hit a
couple of problems.  One was that I never managed to get the agent
default category to work "out of the box".  

Several times, I went to my gnus dummy account, removed ~/News and
.newsrc*, and put the minimum stuff in .gnus.el (including
gnus-agentize)  and .emacs.  

When I went online, and sais "J j J s", it looked like it was doing
things, and the group buffer said there were articles, but I was
unable to enter the group.  The message said:

Couldn't request group gnu.emacs.gnus: Opened server news.std.com using directo\

And instead of finding the rest of the message, I went into the
category buffer and edited the predicate of the default category to
"true", and after that things would work.  

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> assures me that it works "out of the 
box" for him, but hasn't been able to tell me how to find the box it
works out of.  It is academic for me, and presumably for most
experienced gnus users, since most people probably want to edit their
predicates, but it was a stumbling block for me for quite a while, and 
might be for other new users.

-- 
Laura (mailto:lconrad@world.std.com , http://www.world.std.com/~lconrad/ )
(617) 661-8097	 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139

Re: using the agent default category

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

lconrad@world.std.com writes:

> When I went online, and sais "J j J s", it looked like it was doing
> things, and the group buffer said there were articles, but I was
> unable to enter the group.  The message said:
> 
> Couldn't request group gnu.emacs.gnus: Opened server news.std.com using directo\
> 
> And instead of finding the rest of the message, I went into the
> category buffer and edited the predicate of the default category to
> "true", and after that things would work.  

Hm.  Entering groups should only depend on whether there are headers
in the group or not, and the predicate only affects whether articles
are downloaded, so I don't understand this.

But Agent startup issues haven't been tested all that much.  I get the 
feeling that it basically doesn't work, but after restarting a few
times and fiddling a bit it starts working, and people forget to file
bug reports.

Could a few of youse try to start using the agent "for the first time" 
-- perhaps out of a new, pristine account -- according to how the
manual says it should be done, and see how things go?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen