Re: agent/fetch only articles from certain levels

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

asjo@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

> On Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:58:21 +0000, Eric wrote:
>
>> Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com> writes:
>>> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> [...]
>
>>>> I think I do understand.  You may wish to set not only
>>>> gnus-activate-level but also gnus-activate-foreign-newsgroups to 5?  It
>>>> defaults to 4, I believe.
>>> 
>>> That works yes! Wow. Thanks!  But "foreign group"? Why are they foreign
>>> groups? They are groups attached to nntp servers defined in select
>>> methods. Ye gods its complicated ;) ...
>
>> Somebody will correct me but I think /foreign/ groups refer to those
>> where the actual content is stored remotely (nntp, nnimap) versus
>> locally (nnml, nnmaildir).
>
> The manual says:
>
> ,----[ 10.4 Terminology - http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_366.html ]
> |  native
> |      Gnus will always use one method (and back end) as the native, or
> |      default, way of getting news.
> | 
> |  foreign
> |      You can also have any number of foreign groups active at the same
> |      time. These are groups that use non-native non-secondary back ends
> |      for getting news.
> | 
> |  secondary
> |      Secondary back ends are somewhere half-way between being native and
> |      being foreign, but they mostly act like they are native.
> `----
>
>
>   Best regards,
>
>     Adam

Adam, thanks for the pointer to the relevant place in the manual.  My
guess was basically completely wrong.  Oh well...

However, I am not sure the documentation really explains anything at
all.  It's the kind of documentation that makes sense if you already
know what it is telling you and otherwise just sounds like a circular
definition...  and, unfortunately, there are quite a few sections like
this in the gnus manual.

In any case, this definitely doesn't help me (or the OP maybe)
understand why the default activation level for native groups is 6 and
for foreign is 4; and what about secondary...?  And how any of this
relates to agents?

Have a great weekend all!

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1 + No Gnus v0.16