Elias Oltmanns <eo@nebensachen.de> wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> currently, after I have downloaded articles from a server and switched
> into unplugged operation, aell agentised servers remains open in a
> sense, i.e., when I enter a group served by any of those servers, gnus
> tries to connect to the server and if it succeeds, treats it as any
> other open server. Only if the connection fails, the server is switched
> offline. I wonder whether this really is a desirable behaviour.
> Personally, I clearly prefer gnus to behave "unplugged" as it tells me
> in the mode line. If I really want to open one of those servers, I can
> still do so explicitly in the server buffer. Also, the current behaviour
> should be rather annoying in an dial-on-demand setup. Shouldn't
> gnus-agent-close-connections switch all agentised servers offline?

As it turns out, the problem is a somewhat more subtle one. Mind you, I
still think that it would be a sensible idea to switch agentised servers
offline in gnus-agent-close-connections, if only to make sure that they
show up correctly (that is, with status flag "(offline)") in the server
buffer right after switching to unplugged mode.

However, the behaviour I described in my original mail is due to another
problem. As a matter of fact, gnus currently doesn't reliably recognise
agentised servers, or, more precisely, sometimes a method is improperly
considered not covered by the agent. The problem is this:
gnus-agent-covered-methods, sadly, doesn't store methods but only server
names. Well, this approach requires the notion of a canonical server
name. For that purpose, gnus-server-named-server determines the name of
a server by feeding its method to gnus-method-to-server and so should
gnus-agent-method-p. Unfortunately, there is a flaw in this concept
since gnus-method-to-server consults gnus-server-method-cache and
returns the first entry matching the method. Supposing gnus-server-alist
contains an entry like this:
("provider" nnimap "provider"
 (nnimap-server-address "imap.provider.com")

then gnus-server-method-cache will eventually, depending on the sequence
of events, contain entries like this:
(...
 ("nnimap:provider" nnimap "provider"
  (nnimap-server-address "imap.provider.com")
 ...
 ("provider" nnimap "provider"
  (nnimap-server-address "imap.provider.com")
 ...)

So, the result of gnus-method-to-server is not predictable for any given
method if it is in the cache.

For these reasons I suggest to apply the patch attached below. Actually,
I'd prefer to have gnus-agent-covered-methods store methods rather than
servers, but I suppose that this will introduce more problems with
existing installations upgrading to the next release of gnus.

Regards,

Elias

Applies to current trunk: