Problem with gnus-article-sort-by-date

Problem with gnus-article-sort-by-date

[Florent Rougon]

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Hi,

I have a problem with gnus-article-sort-by-date: with some groups, it
sometimes happens that I get the following error when entering them:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-number-of-arguments #<subr null> 2)
  not([889 "SVN tetex-doc-nonfree commit: r1660 - tetex-base/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual tetex-doc-nonfree/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual" "Frank Küster <frank@costa.debian.org>" #("Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:13:03 +0000" 0 1 (gnus-time ...) 1 31 nil) "<E1GVTyB-0004V3-Du@costa.debian.org>" "" 456 20 "florent.maison Debian-tetex-commits:889" ((To . "debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org"))] [888 "SVN tetex-base commit: r1660 - tetex-base/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual tetex-doc-nonfree/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual" "Frank Küster <frank@costa.debian.org>" #("Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:13:03 +0000" 0 1 (gnus-time ...) 1 31 nil) "<E1GVTyB-0004Ux-2G@costa.debian.org>" "" 456 20 "florent.maison Debian-tetex-commits:888" ((To . "debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org"))])
(...)

  gnus-summary-prepare()
  gnus-summary-read-group-1("nnml+mail:Debian-tetex-commits" nil t nil nil nil)
  gnus-summary-read-group("nnml+mail:Debian-tetex-commits" nil t nil nil nil nil)
  gnus-group-read-group(nil t)
  gnus-group-select-group(nil)
  gnus-topic-select-group(nil)
  call-interactively(gnus-topic-select-group)

I abridged the backtrace, because it is quite big and contains weird
characters, but you can find it untouched as an attachment.

Once the error happens in a group, I cannot enter the group, therefore
cannot delete any message from this group; thus, it becomes permanent.
But it seems to be triggered by a particular message in the group,
because before the error happens, everything was working fine (I mean,
this is not a transient error).

The problem happens at line 4665 of gnus-sum.el, when this form is
evaluated:

   (sort articles (gnus-make-sort-function
                   gnus-article-sort-functions))

I found that it always happens in groups that have this configuration
(group parameters set in .gnus.el):

         (":Debian-\\(tetex\\|texlive\\|lmodern\\)-commits$"

          [irrelevant group parameters snipped]

          (gnus-article-sort-functions
           '(not gnus-article-sort-by-date)))

I noticed that if I comment out the:

  (gnus-article-sort-functions
   '(not gnus-article-sort-by-date)

part of the group parameters, the problem disappears (but of course, I
don't get the sort I wish for that group).

I had this problem with Gnus 5.10.7 and upgraded to No Gnus v0.6 (more
precisely: the gnus Debian package version 5.11+v0.5.dfsg-3) in the hope
it would be fixed there, but it is not.

Many thanks for your help in solving this issue.


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-- 
Florent

Re: [solved] Problem with gnus-article-sort-by-date

[Florent Rougon]

Florent Rougon <flo@via.ecp.fr> wrote:

>          (":Debian-\\(tetex\\|texlive\\|lmodern\\)-commits$"
>
>           [irrelevant group parameters snipped]
>
>           (gnus-article-sort-functions
>            '(not gnus-article-sort-by-date)))

OK, I finally tracked down the problem and the conclusion is that I was
using a bad syntax for gnus-article-sort-functions: it was missing a
pair of parentheses around the "not gnus-article-sort-by-date".

Therefore, the problem is solved by using:

         (":Debian-\\(tetex\\|texlive\\|lmodern\\)-commits$"

          [irrelevant group parameters snipped]

          (gnus-article-sort-functions
           '((not gnus-article-sort-by-date))))

For those who tried to find out what was happening, the form whose
evaluation failed was equivalent to:

((lambda
  (t1 t2)
  (or
   (gnus-article-sort-by-date t1 t2)
   (and
    (not
     (gnus-article-sort-by-date t2 t1))
    (not t1 t2))))
 [889 "SVN tetex-doc-nonfree commit: r1660 - tetex-base/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual tetex-doc-nonfree/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual" "Frank Küster <frank@costa.debian.org>" "Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:13:03 +0000" "<E1GVTyB-0004V3-Du@costa.debian.org>" "" 456 20 "florent.maison Debian-tetex-commits:889"
      ((To . "debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org"))]

         [888 "SVN tetex-base commit: r1660 - tetex-base/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual tetex-doc-nonfree/trunk/doc/pdftex/manual" "Frank Küster <frank@costa.debian.org>" "Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:13:03 +0000" "<E1GVTyB-0004Ux-2G@costa.debian.org>" "" 456 20 "florent.maison Debian-tetex-commits:888"
      ((To . "debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org"))]
         )

The point of failure was the "(not t1 t2)". This means the lambda
expression returned by gnus-make-sort-function was wrong, and this is
because it was fed with invalid input (parentheses missing around the
not "gnus-article-sort-by-date").

I used a (setq gnus-use-byte-compile nil) early in my .emacs.el to avoid
the byte-compilation of the sort function by
gnus-make-sort-function---that was making the backtrace rather difficult
to use.

-- 
Florent