Syncing Gnus

Syncing Gnus

[Richard Riley]

This comes up everys now and again and I thought maybe time again.

Who has recently set up gnus so its data is easily synced. There are a
plethora of location values some I think might overlap - I'm not sure -
I just know I keep finding News and Mail dirs in in my home dir every
now and again ;). Ideally there would be ONE variable to set and all
archives, news and mail and book marks and everything would go under
there so only that dir would by synced. It would include .newsrc* files
too. 

In particular what is gnus-home-directory?

,----
| Directory variable that specifies the "home" directory.
| All other Gnus file and directory variables are initialized from this variable.
`----

What does "home" here mean?

Does this refer to Mail/News or where gnus finds it code or both?

Should it not be enough to ONLY set this and the rest follow on?

Maybe I'm overthinking or panicking a little. All I want is ALL gnus
"runtime"* type data to sit under ONE directory. How is this best achieved?


* :dribble files, newsrc file,  killfiles, group subscriptions, articles, caches etc etc etc

Re: Syncing Gnus

[Richard Riley]

Richard Riley <rileyrg@gmail.com> writes:

> This comes up everys now and again and I thought maybe time again.
>
> Who has recently set up gnus so its data is easily synced. There are a
> plethora of location values some I think might overlap - I'm not sure -
> I just know I keep finding News and Mail dirs in in my home dir every
> now and again ;). Ideally there would be ONE variable to set and all
> archives, news and mail and book marks and everything would go under
> there so only that dir would by synced. It would include .newsrc* files
> too. 
>
> In particular what is gnus-home-directory?
>
> ,----
> | Directory variable that specifies the "home" directory.
> | All other Gnus file and directory variables are initialized from this variable.
> `----
>
> What does "home" here mean?
>
> Does this refer to Mail/News or where gnus finds it code or both?
>
> Should it not be enough to ONLY set this and the rest follow on?
>
> Maybe I'm overthinking or panicking a little. All I want is ALL gnus
> "runtime"* type data to sit under ONE directory. How is this best achieved?
>
> * :dribble files, newsrc file,  killfiles, group subscriptions, articles, caches etc etc etc
>

e.g having used the setting the chap used for the dropbox sync, I end up
with a new News dir in my home dir containing drafts.

,----
| [8992]shamrock@development:~$ ls -l News/
| total 4
| drwxr-xr-x 4 shamrock shamrock 4096 Jan  7 23:00 drafts
| [8993]shamrock@development:~$ 
`----

saving this article into drafts and restarting and ^ is where its
stored. There doesnt seem be any draft dir setting or?

my current setup (a blatant copy of the dropbox example previously
posted) :

(setq message-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/"
      gnus-home-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/"
      gnus-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/"
      gnus-default-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/"
      gnus-dribble-ignore t
      gnus-article-save-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/"
      gnus-kill-files-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/"
      gnus-cache-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/cache/"
      )

in addition to this I also have 

 '(gnus-startup-file "~/Dropbox/.main/.newsrc")

seems overkill, how to simplify?

Old ground, but still confusing and tripping me up.

Re: Syncing Gnus

[Richard Riley]

OK.. now I have the values set before gnus is loaded. Much better. And
most things seem to propery intitiate. However I *still* get a ~/Mail
created :-

,----
| [9096]shamrock@development:~$ ls -l Mail
| total 4
| drwxr-xr-x 2 shamrock shamrock 4096 Jan  8 01:29 archive
`----

My archive method is like this :-

,----
|  (setq gnus-message-archive-method 
|        '(nnfolder "archive"
| 	 	  (nnfolder-directory   "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/archive")
| 		  (nnfolder-active-file "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/archive/active")
| 		  (nnfolder-get-new-mail nil)
| 		  (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t)))
`----

Is it not possible to lose the directory directives and have it based on the
other base settings? Am I missing a base setting (the nomenclature and
general Mail/News overlap makes it very hard to guess whats doinf what imo)

my setup pre load of gnus is now :-

,----
| (setq 
|       message-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/"
|       ;; nndraft-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/drafts/"
|       gnus-home-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/"
|       ;; gnus-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/"
|       ;; gnus-default-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/"
|       ;; gnus-article-save-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/"
|       ;; gnus-kill-files-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/"
|       ;; gnus-cache-directory "~/Dropbox/.main/News/cache/"
|       gnus-startup-file "~/.emacs.d/.newsrc"
|       gnus-use-dribble-file nil
|       bbdb-file "~/.emacs.d/.bbdb"
|       nnfolder-directory   "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/archive"
|       nnfolder-active-file "~/DropBox/.main/Mail/archive/active"
|       )
`----

So, how to stop this "unnecessary" Mail dir being created?

Re: Syncing Gnus

[Vitalie Spinu]

Richard Riley <rileyrg@gmail.com> writes:

> OK.. now I have the values set before gnus is loaded. Much better. And
> most things seem to propery intitiate. However I *still* get a ~/Mail
> created :-
>
> ,----
> | [9096]shamrock@development:~$ ls -l Mail
> | total 4
> | drwxr-xr-x 2 shamrock shamrock 4096 Jan  8 01:29 archive
> `----
>
> My archive method is like this :-
>
> ,----
> |  (setq gnus-message-archive-method 
> |        '(nnfolder "archive"
> | 	 	  (nnfolder-directory   "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/archive")
> | 		  (nnfolder-active-file "~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/archive/active")
> | 		  (nnfolder-get-new-mail nil)
> | 		  (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t)))
> `----

Hi Richard,

I struggled with the exactly the same problem when synchronizing
Dropbox. I was sloppy enough in my comments
                                                                      
/===
| ;; (setq gnus-update-message-archive-method t) ;; doesn't seem to work 
| as advertised, edit gnus.eld directly to have an effect                
\===

In the documentation of gnus-update-message-archive-method is stated
that gnus.eld should be updated automatically, but it is not.

So, I just replaced manually all the occurrences of ~/Mail/archive in gnus.eld
with ~/Dropbox/.main/Mail/archive .

 The main problem is that not all of gnus dirs are set from
gnus-directory as claimed in the docs (for instance
gnus-article-save-directory gnus-kill-files-directory and
gnus-cache-directory).

The nuisance with Mail/archive was really confusing. It took me ages to
figure it out. It would be nice if someone could simplify it a bit.

Best,
Vitalie.

Re: Syncing Gnus

[Sivaram Neelakantan]

On Sun, Jan 08 2012,Richard Riley wrote:

> This comes up everys now and again and I thought maybe time again.
>
> Who has recently set up gnus so its data is easily synced. There are a
> plethora of location values some I think might overlap - I'm not sure -
> I just know I keep finding News and Mail dirs in in my home dir every
> now and again ;). Ideally there would be ONE variable to set and all
> archives, news and mail and book marks and everything would go under
> there so only that dir would by synced. It would include .newsrc* files
> too. 

[snipped 14 lines]

> Maybe I'm overthinking or panicking a little. All I want is ALL gnus
> "runtime"* type data to sit under ONE directory. How is this best achieved?

[snipped 9 lines]

oh cthulhu! yes, yes, yes.  If it can be done in a manner that is
apparent with the least amount of configuration entries, that would be
fantastic! 

I've sort of given up tracking where Gnus creates all the files and
simply copy random files and folders over(not really) to any other
machine when I migrate. 

But I wish if something like LaTeX TEXMF was designed (or something
simpler if you want) to cater to all the twisted ways of Gnus.  And I
mean that in the nicest sense possible.

 sivaram
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