swapping which account is my "primary" select method

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

I’ve recently had a change at work that has resulted in me adding a second email (IMAP) account to my Gnus config, with each account receiving email, though eventually the first, my current gnus-select-method, will be phased out entirely. Basically, right now, I want to change which one is “primary” without losing any data about the accounts or ticked articles or whatever. I’ve also got some nnvirtual groups, which of course means that Gnus has constructed and saved regular expressions to match group names that may or may not include the server names.

Is there a nice, user-friendly way I’m overlooking to swap the “primary” and a secondary select method around, keeping everything working (or even everything but the nnvirtual regexps), and without losing any state?

I’ve considered going through .newsrc.eld, editing group names, changing where server specs are present, rewriting nnvirtual regular expressions, figuring out how to update the .newsrc file, and so on, but given that it’s a one-shot deal, much of the data exists on the IMAP servers, and I have few gmane/gwene groups, I’m seriously wondering if the easiest way might be to delete all the Gnus data and start over, rebuild topics and virtual groups, etc.

Ken