Re: gnus-cloud.el

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> writes:

> On Saturday, 2020-03-28 at 10:19:11 -07, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>> David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> writes:
>>
>>> After some time away, I'm playing with Gnus again. In this instance,
>>> gnus-cloud isn't working for me.
>>>
>>> Specifically, I can add a gnus-cloud storage server (on nnimap) and
>>> register another server (nntp) with it. ~u causes messages to be added
>>> to Emacs-Cloud and they appear to have the right kind of content.
>>>
>>> ~d on another machine never does anything useful (e.g. mark some
>>> articles as read) because this test:
>>>
>>>               (if (and newer (not force-older))
>>>                 (gnus-message 3 "Skipping outdated cloud info for group %s, the info is from %s (now is %s)" group date now)
>>>
>>> always returns true.
>>>
>>> Looking at how `newer' is calculated, it compares the group timestamp
>>> from the gnus-cloud message with the current time. It's not clear to me
>>> how that test is ever going to return `nil', unless I have a version of
>>> emacs running somewhere in the future that updates gnus-cloud.
>>
>> It's true that doesn't make a lot of sense. Presumably we should be
>> checking against some value from `gnus-cloud-file-timestamps' instead.
>
> I'm not syncing any files with gnus-cloud, so I'm not sure how that
> might help.

Oh, I had assumed that one of the files in that variable would be
.newsrc.eld, and that timestamp would be the relevant one. But you're
right -- this ought to be what `gnus-cloud-sequence' is for.

> In general I would have expected to replay any changes with a higher
> sequence number, irrespective of the date of the changes. That they
> happened in the past is somewhat the point, isn't it? :-)
>
> Another problem is that after a set of Emacs-Cloud messages have been
> used to replay, the emacs instance doing that replay doesn't persist the
> last seen sequence value as `gnus-cloud-sequence', so the next time it
> attempts to replay it will unnecessarily replay the same sequence
> numbered messages again.
>
> Anyway, attached is a suggested patch. This makes things work for me in
> some limited testing. Comments welcome!

I encourage you to open a bug report and put this patch on it. As
demonstrated, I don't know this code at all, and probably won't have
time to go through and learn it in the next week or so -- a bug report
is more likely to be seen by Lars or Ted (who I think wrote this
originally, I may be wrong).

Yours,
Eric