Re: nnml suddenly not activating groups on startup

[Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>]

Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk> writes:

> All¹ of my mail groups have "nnml:" as the last element in
> gnus-newsrc-alist.

> I have a feeling that Gnus sometimes gets confused about servers that
> are the same but mentioned by different definitions. Maybe going all
> "nnml:" or all (nnml "") will unconfuse things?

I tried changing everything to "nnml:" and that caused all of the groups
to not be activated and then, in the server buffer, the nnml server was
left closed after I started Gnus.

I then changed them all to (nnml "") and that fixes the problem (but I
suspect new groups won't have that setting).

So (nnml "") seems to be doing something different than "nnml:" and is
working correctly, and this appears to have something to do with when the
server is opened.  Maybe it's a sequencing issue during startup?

For the record, my select-method configuration is:

 '(gnus-select-method
   '(nntp "news.eyrie.org"
          (nntp-open-connection-function network-only)
          (nntp-connection-timeout 3)))
 '(gnus-secondadry-select-methods '((nnml "")))

> Does your server buffer show multiple nnml-servers?

It does not, but now that you mention this, I feel like at one point I did
see this and "fixed it" by deleting one of the servers.  I should have
remembered that, and that's probably related, although I'm fairly sure my
problems started before that and this was one of my attempts to fix it.

> ¹ Not my archive groups, though, they seem to all carry a copy of the full
> server definition:
>    (nnml "archive" (nnml-directory "~/Mail/archive")
>          (nnml-active-file "~/Mail/archive/active")
>          (nnml-get-new-mail nil)
>          (nnml-inhibit-expiry t))
> as the last element. That seems a little much.

Mine had this in gnus-server-alist and just a reference to "archive" in
the group information, but while I've been working on this problem (and
after it started), I finally got rid of the second nnml server for
archiving and just merged all that stuff into my main nnml server because
I've had no end of problems with having two nnml servers for years.  It
seems to confuse Gnus and I have regularly had Gnus write things into the
archive server instead of the main server in weird edge cases.  The last
straw was that while I was restarting Gnus to try to get to the bottom of
this problem, one time Gnus split all of my incoming mail into the archive
server instead of the main nnml server.

The multiple nnml server support seems kind of buggy, in other words, and
has been for years, although it previously had never irritated me enough
to change it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>