gnus 20110821 will CoRrUpT your .newsrc.eld, you have been XwarnedX burned

[jidanni@jidanni.org]

Use emacs-snapshot 1:20110821-1 and you won't be able to start gnus, as
your .newsrc.eld got corrupted last session.

Here's what wdiff(1) and uni2ascii(1) say now gets plastered into our
.newsrc.eld files starting with emacs-snapshot 1:20110821-1

{+(if (gnus-lrm-string-p gnus-tmp-qualified-group) (concat+}
======================================================================
 {+#
  ("0x200E" 0 1 (invisible t))) (gnus-correct-substring gnus-tmp-qualified-group 0 61))+}
======================================================================
 {+(if (gnus-lrm-string-p val) (concat+}
======================================================================
 {+#
  ("0x200E" 0 1 (invisible t))) (gnus-correct-substring val 0 6))+}
======================================================================
 {+(if (gnus-lrm-string-p val) (concat+}
======================================================================
 {+#
  ("0x200E" 0 1 (invisible t))) (gnus-correct-substring val 0 14))+}
=================================================================

Now this will result in
Error in /home/jidanni/.newsrc.eld line 32
when you start gnus,
as e.g., the # alone will cause it to be invalid lisp.
The cure is to downgrade your emacs-snapshot to a previous version,
and replace the (setq gnus-format-specs ... of your .newsrc.eld with a
previous version from your backups. You did make backups...

You know isn't it rather silly/dangerous to trust everything to the
fragile monolithic .newsrc.eld file not getting damaged. If the gnus
designers are going to play so dangerously, maybe they should split it
into several different files.