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

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

[jidanni]

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.

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

[Katsumi Yamaoka]

jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
> 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))+}

I believe you can manually replace all the

#("XXX" 0 1 (invisible t))

with

""

to fix it.  Where XXX is the binary 0x200E.

Why this happened is that you used Gnus compiled with Emacs that
provided the function `string-mark-left-to-rigth'.  But it's been
renamed into `bidi-string-mark-left-to-rigth' in 2011-08-18, and
newly compiled Gnus will never use it.  I don't know what it is
for, so I have no idea to settle this problem appropriately.