Re: Calling for testers: scratch/gnus-decoded branch

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Wed 29 May 2019, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

> Hello reckless Gnus users!
>
> I'm working on the second half of the refactoring that broke everyone's
> Gnus last time -- changing the hash tables to real hash tables, and
> group names to decoded strings.
>
> In order to prevent a repeat performance of the last patch, I have a)
> been much more careful about testing this one, and b) hope I can talk a
> handful of you into helping me test.
>
> Basically you would check out a local copy of the scratch/gnus-decoded
> branch, run "make" in it, BACK UP YOUR .newsrc.eld FILE, then restart
> Emacs and do what you normally do in Gnus, and see if anything looks
> funny. When you're tired of that, switch back to master, run "make"
> again, and replace your backup .newsrc.eld file.

If this set of changes modifies the file format of .newsrc.eld then you
need a different strategy to ensure that users can continue to use their
gnus data on both old and new gnus.

This will be needed until all major distros have updated to use newer
emacs, and users have also updated (i.e. several years).

While modernizing the codebase is useful and welcome, user data is
important, and users will not thank you for doing a one-way "upgrade"
to their files which prevents them from using an older gnus on a
different machine.

> I'm particularly interested in testing from people who have groups with
> non-ascii names -- that's really the whole crux of this issue.
>
> Remember to back up your .newsrc.eld file! If you forget, it will be
> fixable, but Gnus master won't like the decoded non-ascii group names.

If the file data is not compatible between old and new gnus, then you
must change approach to use a new filename for the new format and allow
users to continue to use the old format on new gnus (for compatibility
with also running older gnus using the same files).

    AndyM