Wizards, Saints and Guardian Angels

[Robert Epprecht <epprecht@sunweb.ch>]

In the thread about Lars' message <m3n19jsrfo.fsf@quimbies.gnus.org>
'A road map for Oort Gnus' there has been a lot of discussion about
setup wizards (or saints) and the like.  I would suggest thinking
about creating yet another type of helpers in the Gnus universe:
The Guardian Angels.

Let me give an actual example that just bites me to show what I mean:
My ISP's news server is very unreliable. Not only that it breaks down
much too often, just to come back with message numbers in a completely
changed range, but also my ISP was sold three times to another company.
The news server was always aliased (hope the word make sense here) to
another news server without prior notice.  Can you imagine the mess
in my (agentized) Gnus after such events?  It would have been very
helpful, if Gnus would have stopped, saying that the received data
looks strange and asked if I want to proceed or what, before changing
it's internal data.  I could have made a fresh backup first or so...

Would it be possible to recognise some of the more frequent error
conditions *before* they could damage Gnus' data?  What are the
most frequent encountered such conditions that do confuse Gnus?


I see four stages where such Guardian Angels could make the live
of a naive Gnus user like me more convenient:

* Warn the user before corrupted incoming data would damage Gnus' files
  where possible.  (This being Gnus it would be switch able of course).
* Warn the user when internal data seems corrupted.
* Giving more information in the manual about disaster diagnosis and
  recovery (see next point).
* Providing more helper functions to (check and) fix things.

While setup wizards would help just once in the career of a Gnus
user, things like this could help him out every now and then.

Maybe it would also be possible to make Gnus even more robust
than it already is in such a harsh environment.  What do you think?

Robert Epprecht