Old news keeps coming back.

Old news keeps coming back.

[Barry Fishman]

Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
were not seen.

Its hard to be less vague about what is going on.  It is very
difficult to debug now that some of the group status is store outside
of the .newsrc.eld file and if I try to reproduce things by editing
the group information ('G E') or going back to an old .newsrc.eld
file, it does very little good.

This is very frustrating.

-- 
Barry Fishman

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Barry Fishman]

More information concerning:

Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:
> Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
> exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
> offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
> were not seen.

Starting with caught up group, on-line, checking new news 'g' found
one new message.  'G E' Reports:

("nntp+netnews.att.net:comp.lang.lisp" 5
 ((1 . 134220))
 ((seen
   (134215 . 134220)))
 "nntp:netnews.att.net")

Download message, exit gnus, exit emacs.  Now restart emacs and start
reading news offline.  Still see one new message. 'G E' reports:

("nntp+netnews.att.net:comp.lang.lisp" 5
 ((1 . 134220))
 ((seen
   (134215 . 134220)))
 "nntp:netnews.att.net")

Unchanged.  Read the message (still offline). 'G E' reports:

("nntp+netnews.att.net:comp.lang.lisp" 5
 ((1 . 134221))
 ((seen
   (134215 . 134221)))
 "nntp:netnews.att.net")

So far so good.  Now go online 'J j' and download new news, see: one
new message: 'G E' Reports:

("nntp+netnews.att.net:comp.lang.lisp" 5
 ((1 . 134220))
 ((seen
   (134215 . 134221)))
 "nntp:netnews.att.net")

Previous message is now considered unread but seen!  Unfortunately
this is not always repeatable, and a new message needs to be seen when
new news is checked to trigger this error.

-- 
Barry Fishman

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Simon Josefsson]

Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:

> Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
> exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
> offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
> were not seen.
>
> Its hard to be less vague about what is going on.  It is very
> difficult to debug now that some of the group status is store outside
> of the .newsrc.eld file and if I try to reproduce things by editing
> the group information ('G E') or going back to an old .newsrc.eld
> file, it does very little good.

Maybe you need to synchronize the marks changes when going online, now
that nntp uses marks.

What's the value of gnus-agent-synchronize-flags?

I notice that the default value for that variable has changed
recently, but I missed the discussion on that, can someone provide a
pointer?

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Simon Josefsson]

Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:
>>
>>> Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
>>> exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
>>> offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
>>> were not seen.
>>
>> Maybe you need to synchronize the marks changes when going online, now
>> that nntp uses marks.
>>
>> What's the value of gnus-agent-synchronize-flags?
>>
>> I notice that the default value for that variable has changed
>> recently, but I missed the discussion on that, can someone provide a
>> pointer?
>
> My gnus-agent-synchronize-flags value has its default value of nil.
> Should I assume that is the problem?

You could try setting it to 'ask and answering 'y' when it wants to
synchronize flags.  Perhaps it will copy the flag changes made when
unplugged into the ~/News/nntp/server/group/.marks file.

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Barry Fishman]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:
>
>> Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
>> exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
>> offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
>> were not seen.
>
> Maybe you need to synchronize the marks changes when going online, now
> that nntp uses marks.
>
> What's the value of gnus-agent-synchronize-flags?
>
> I notice that the default value for that variable has changed
> recently, but I missed the discussion on that, can someone provide a
> pointer?

My gnus-agent-synchronize-flags value has its default value of nil.
Should I suppose that I need to set this to true.  When the agent
changes were first made, I think this was the case, and I found
my emacs would freeze up for a considerable amount of time as
these 'flags' where synchronized.

I can not find any discussion or documentation outsize of how it
applies to IMAP groups, where the server does have 'flag' information.
However, for those of us with just news groups and non IMAP mail,
there seems to be no information about what is to be accomplished by
the involved synchronization process that now seems to exist, or how
to avoid it.

-- 
Barry Fishman

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Raphaël Berbain]

Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:
>>
>>> Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
>>> exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
>>> offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
>>> were not seen.

FWIW, I see the same thing here.  Quite reproductible, too:  Read
some group, quit Gnus, start Gnus again, go online, get new news.
Old articles appear as unread/seen.

>> Maybe you need to synchronize the marks changes when going online, now
>> that nntp uses marks.
>>
>> What's the value of gnus-agent-synchronize-flags?
>>
>> I notice that the default value for that variable has changed
>> recently, but I missed the discussion on that, can someone provide a
>> pointer?
>
> My gnus-agent-synchronize-flags value has its default value of nil.
> Should I suppose that I need to set this to true.

Setting it to t solved the issue for me.  However, the documentation
is misleading/out of sync:  It says the default value for g-a-s-f is
'ask, whereas it is now nil.  Also, it appears in the Agent and IMAP
node, while it now seems relevant to nntp as well.

All in all, it seems to me that the default setup is broken:  With
g-a-s-f set to t and agentized nntp, old articles come back.  Maybe
it is dependant on some other bit of config, though.

So the questions: Does anybody know why Lars changed the default
g-a-s-f value to nil ?  What is this nntp marks stuff anyway ?  Marks
w/ imap, I get it, but I basically can't write anything on the nntp
servers I use.  Why does Gnus even try to synchronize marks with
nntp ?

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Kai Grossjohann]

raphael.berbain@free.fr (Raphaël Berbain) writes:

> So the questions: Does anybody know why Lars changed the default
> g-a-s-f value to nil ?  What is this nntp marks stuff anyway ?  Marks
> w/ imap, I get it, but I basically can't write anything on the nntp
> servers I use.  Why does Gnus even try to synchronize marks with
> nntp ?

Gnus remembers which articles you have seen, ticked, etc.  This is
stored in the files ~/.newsrc.eld.

If nntp-marks-is-evil is nil, then this information is additionally
saved in one file per group under ~/News/marks.

If both the ~/News/marks file and ~/.newsrc.eld data are available,
the ~/News/marks file is used.

Kai

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Raphaël Berbain]

Thanks to both of you for those very clear explanations, Kai and
Simon.  More on the original problem: I think I just saw it again, but
this time with gnus-agent-synchronize-flags set to t.  I am not sure,
though, so I'll update on this later.

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Raphaël Berbain]

raphael.berbain@free.fr (Raphaël Berbain) writes:

> More on the original problem: I think I just saw it again, but this
> time with gnus-agent-synchronize-flags set to t.  I am not sure,
> though, so I'll update on this later.

The promised update: False alarm.  Everything seems to be ok with
gnus-agent-synchronize-flags set to t.

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Simon Josefsson]

raphael.berbain@free.fr (Raphaël Berbain) writes:

>> My gnus-agent-synchronize-flags value has its default value of nil.
>> Should I suppose that I need to set this to true.
>
> Setting it to t solved the issue for me.  However, the documentation
> is misleading/out of sync:  It says the default value for g-a-s-f is
> 'ask, whereas it is now nil.  Also, it appears in the Agent and IMAP
> node, while it now seems relevant to nntp as well.

Yes, it was changed to nil only recently.  I think we should change it
back to 'ask.  I don't know what motivated the change.

> So the questions: Does anybody know why Lars changed the default
> g-a-s-f value to nil ?  What is this nntp marks stuff anyway ?  Marks
> w/ imap, I get it, but I basically can't write anything on the nntp
> servers I use.  Why does Gnus even try to synchronize marks with
> nntp ?

nntp.el write the marks to ~/News/nntp somewhere, so you can rsync
them (or something) between different Gnus installations and have
things work.

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Barry Fishman]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:
>
>> Using the CVS version of GNUS I find that when I read news offline,
>> exit news (normally) and come back later, read new news, and go
>> offline, I find the messages I have read are listed again as if they
>> were not seen.
>
> Maybe you need to synchronize the marks changes when going online, now
> that nntp uses marks.
>
> What's the value of gnus-agent-synchronize-flags?
>
> I notice that the default value for that variable has changed
> recently, but I missed the discussion on that, can someone provide a
> pointer?

My gnus-agent-synchronize-flags value has its default value of nil.
Should I suppose that I need to set this to true.  When the agent
changes were first made, I think this was the case, and I found
my emacs would freeze up for a considerable amount of time as
these 'flags' where synchronized.

I can not find any discussion or documentation outsize of how it
applies to IMAP groups, where the server does have 'flag' information.
However, for those of us with just news groups and non IMAP mail,
there seems to be no information about what is to be accomplished by
the involved synchronization process that now seems to exist, or how
to avoid it.

-- 
Barry Fishman

Re: Old news keeps coming back.

[Kai Grossjohann]

Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net> writes:

> Its hard to be less vague about what is going on.  It is very
> difficult to debug now that some of the group status is store outside
> of the .newsrc.eld file and if I try to reproduce things by editing
> the group information ('G E') or going back to an old .newsrc.eld
> file, it does very little good.

Well, you could have a look at the marks file in ~/News/marks.  Does
that help?

I'm seeing something similar to you, but I thought I was doing
something wrong regarding marks synchronization.  I was uploading
~/News/marks onto a server after quitting Gnus, then I went to
another computer, downloaded ~/News/marks from that server, then
started Gnus, and many articles were marked as unread that I had read
before.

Kai