How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[Rodolfo Medina]

I'd like to change the gnus default `~/Mail' and '~/News' directories,
together with all their subdirectories: 
'~/Mail/drafts', '~/Mail/queue', '~/Mail/mail/misc',
'~/News/agent', '~/News/lib' etcetera,
into other dirs and subdirs at my pleasure.
Can anyone suggest how? What variables shall I customize?
I couldn't work it out from the Gnus Manual.

Thanks in advance for any hint,
Rodolfo

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Fri, 2 Sep 2005 18:23:39 +0000 (UTC), Rodolfo wrote:

> I'd like to change the gnus default `~/Mail' and '~/News'
> directories,

Just out of curiosity: Why?

> Can anyone suggest how? What variables shall I customize? I couldn't
> work it out from the Gnus Manual.

How about:

~/Mail:

,----[ C-h v message-directory RET ]
| `message-directory' is a variable declared in Lisp.
|   -- loaded from "message"
| 
| Value: "~/Mail/"
| 
| Documentation:
| *Directory from which all other mail file variables are derived.
`----

~/News:

,----[ C-h v gnus-directory RET ]
| `gnus-directory' is a variable declared in Lisp.
|   -- loaded from "gnus"
| 
| Value: "~/News/"
| 
| Documentation:
| *Directory variable from which all other Gnus file variables are derived.
| 
| Note that Gnus is mostly loaded when the `.gnus.el' file is read.
| This means that other directory variables that are initialized from
| this variable won't be set properly if you set this variable in `.gnus.el'.
| Set this variable in `.emacs' instead.
`----

(and your 'gnus-message-archive-method'). Note: I haven't tried this,
so I don't know how much more, if anything, you need to set.


Where in the manual did you look? I just searched for '~/Mail' and
'~/News'...


  Best regards,

-- 
 "KOMPRESSOR crush american burger"                           Adam Sjøgren
                                                         asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[romeomedina]

I have:
Gnus version 5.11, included in Emacs CVS 21.3.50.1 of 2005-03-13.

Rodolfo wrote:

> I'd like to change the gnus default `~/Mail' and '~/News' directories,
> together with all their subdirectories:
> '~/Mail/drafts', '~/Mail/queue', '~/Mail/mail/misc',
> '~/News/agent', '~/News/lib' etcetera,
> into other dirs and subdirs at my pleasure.


Adam Sjøgren wrote:

> Just out of curiosity: Why?


Because I want to decide where to put my stuff, and besides:
I'm totally new to the 'newrseaderly fashion' gnus is conceived,
and I still haven't even well understood what a newsreader actually is.
I come from MS Outlook world, only know about sending and receiving
e-mails from internet and am just now having a look at gnus,
that for me is very very strange (although interesting).
So I don't understand the meaning of subdirectories such as 'agent',
'lib', 'queue', and so on. Now, as beginner, I only need three directories:
received-mail, sent-mail and drafts, included under a superdirectory 'mail'.
Nothing more, nothing less. In future, when I've learned more about
using gnus, and will be able to understand the meaning of the other dirs,
I will maybe be using them.
At the moment I'm not actually even using gnus, I'm preparing things in order
to migrate from MS Outlook to Gnus.


Rodolfo:

> Can anyone suggest how? What variables shall I customize? I couldn't
> work it out from the Gnus Manual.


Adam:

> How about:
>
> ~/Mail:
>
> ,----[ C-h v message-directory RET ]

> [...]
>
> ~/News:
>
> ,----[ C-h v gnus-directory RET ]
>
> [...]
>
> (and your 'gnus-message-archive-method'). Note: I haven't tried this,
> so I don't know how much more, if anything, you need to set.


Thanks indeed for your precious help (and also thanks to Katsumi Yamaoka for his help
about 'gnus-message-archive-method' customization).
I followed your indications, then performed searches in Gnus Manual from info buffer.


Adam:

>
> Where in the manual did you look? I just searched for '~/Mail' and
> '~/News'...


I have a paper copy of Gnus Manual, and was searching things through its index,
which is quite poor. I'd never used the info buffer before.

Now the situation is the following:
the complete tree of the directories that Gnus creates by default under the '~/' directory
is something like:


   ~/
    |
    |
    |
    /Mail
    |   |
    |   |
    |   /drafts
    |   |
    |   |
    |   /mail
    |       |
    |       |
    |       /misc
    |
    |
    |
    /News
        |
        |
	/agent
	|    |
	|    |
	|    /lib
	|
	|
	/drafts
	      |
	      |
	      /drafts
	      |
	      |
	      /queue


. Now, I wanted to change the gnus default directories '~/Mail' and '~/News',
together with all their subdirs, into other dirs and subdirs at my pleasure.
To do that, I had to customize the 'message-directory' and 'gnus-directory',
but not only. I customized the following variables altogether
(maybe other ones have to be customized as well):


variable name	       	     	     gnus default value
-------------			     ------------------

message-directory		     ~/Mail
gnus-directory			     ~/News
nnml-directory			     ~/Mail
nnml-active-file		     ~/Mail/active
nnml-newsgroups-file		     ~/Mail/newsgroups
nndraft-directory		     ~/News/drafts
gnus-message-archive-method	     (nnfolder "archive"
               			               (nnfolder-directory   "~/Mail/archive")
               				       (nnfolder-active-file "~/Mail/archive/active")
               				       (nnfolder-get-new-mail nil)
               				       (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t))
nnfolder-directory		     ~/Mail/archive
nnfolder-active-file		     ~/Mail/archive/active



, the latter two included in the 'gnus-message-archive-method' variable setting.
Note that what is said in §5.5 of Gnus Manual about the default value of
'gnus-message-archive-method' is not according to what is said in §6.3.13.10 about
the default values of 'nnfolder-directory' and 'nnfolder-active-file'.

'message-directory' and 'gnus-directory' have to be set in the ~/.emacs file,
the other ones in the ~/.gnus.el file.

After setting all those variables, the ~/Mail and ~/News dirctories didn't
exist any more and the above tree became:


   ~/
    |
    |
    |
    /mail
	|
	|
	|
	/agent
	|    |
	|    |
	|    |
	|    /lib
	|
	|
	|
	/drafts
	|
	|
	|
	/queue
	|
	|
	|
	/received-mail
	|
	|
	|
	/sent-mail


. Now, I want to get rid of the subdirs 'agent', 'agent/lib' and 'queue'.
Can anyone suggest how? I searched through the info buffer
but couldn't work the problem out.

Thanks,
Rodolfo




____________________________________________________________
Libero Flat, sempre a 4 Mega a 19,95 euro al mese! 
Abbonati subito su http://www.libero.it

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Sat,  3 Sep 2005 21:14:33 +0200, romeomedina\@libero\.it wrote:

>> I'd like to change the gnus default `~/Mail' and '~/News' directories,
>> together with all their subdirectories:
>> '~/Mail/drafts', '~/Mail/queue', '~/Mail/mail/misc',
>> '~/News/agent', '~/News/lib' etcetera,
>> into other dirs and subdirs at my pleasure.

> Adam Sjøgren wrote:

>> Just out of curiosity: Why?

> Because I want to decide where to put my stuff,

This is not an answer, this is a restatement of your goal.

> and besides: I'm totally new to the 'newrseaderly fashion' gnus is
> conceived, and I still haven't even well understood what a
> newsreader actually is.

How is your understanding of what a newsreader is connected to where
Gnus puts its files?

[...]

> So I don't understand the meaning of subdirectories such as 'agent',
> 'lib', 'queue', and so on. Now, as beginner, I only need three
> directories: received-mail, sent-mail and drafts, included under a
> superdirectory 'mail'.

As a beginner, how do you know this? How can you know whether the
programme, Gnus, needs those directories that you don't know the
meaning of (yet)? How can you tell if they are important - for some
internal use - or not?

I would expect a beginner to customize *as little as possible* until
further understanding is achieved...?

> I followed your indications, then performed searches in Gnus Manual
> from info buffer.

Reading the manual is always a good idea :-)

[...]

> . Now, I want to get rid of the subdirs 'agent', 'agent/lib' and 'queue'.

Why do you want this; why do you care whether they exist or not?

(I don't know how. I'm still curious as to why).


  Best regards,

-- 
 "If I claimed I was emperor just cause some moistened        Adam Sjøgren
  bint lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away"       asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[David Z Maze]

"romeomedina\@libero\.it" <romeomedina@libero.it> writes:

> I'm totally new to the 'newrseaderly fashion' gnus is conceived,
> and I still haven't even well understood what a newsreader actually is.
[...]
> Now, as beginner, I only need three directories: received-mail,
> sent-mail and drafts, included under a superdirectory 'mail'.

If I read a newsgroup (ObPlug: such as the very useful, not
historically directed at Gnus developers, gnu.emacs.gnus group) then I
can see every message as far back in history as the news server
keeps.  My setup actually does try to replicate that: I bcc all mail
to myself, I sort each mailing list I'm on and each person I regularly
send mail to into a separate group, and then the mailing list groups
are total-expirable.

It sounds to me as though you're trying to force Outlook's directory
structure on to Gnus.  As you've discovered, Gnus is very flexible and
you can make it do that.  But someday you're going to have a question
like "how come this article gets stuck in my drafts group" (or, with
your setup, "how come nnml finds my drafts group and then everything
gets confused") and you'll get told to look in ~/News/drafts and it
won't be there.  Changing everything for the sake of changing
everything isn't necessarily a productive exercise.

  --dzm

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[romeomedina]

It seems that I managed to eliminate the 'agent', 'agent/lib' and 'queue'
subdirs from the tree I reported in my previous message. To achieve that,
I just putting in  ~/.gnus.el the line:

(setq gnus-agent nil)

. But now, after receiving mail, another two dirs were created
by gnus: 'mail' and 'mail/misc'. In fact, now my tree is the following:


   ~/
    |
    |
    |
    /mail
	|
	|
	|
	/agent
	|    |
	|    |
	|    |
	|    /lib
	|
	|
	|
	/drafts
	|
	|
	|
	/queue
	|
	|
	|
	/received-mail
	|	     |
	|	     |
	|	     |
	|	     /mail
	|		 |
	|		 |
	|		 |
	|		 /misc
	|
	|
	|
	/sent-mail

. Any idea of how to eliminate 'mail' and 'mail/misc'?
I couldn't find an answer in the Manual.

Adam, what you say is quite right; but just I like getting into the internal
working. And, after all, I don't want to store mail in a 'mail/misc'
subdir of a 'mail' dir unless it is strictly necessary:
it's just what I'd like to work out: I imagine it isn't.
Yes, I can't know whether the programme, Gnus, needs those
directories that I don't know the meaning of yet, but it's just what
I'd like to work out, even at the beginning.

> I would expect a beginner to customize *as little as possible* until
> further understanding is achieved...?

That's right in some way, and in fact I want to customize as little
as possible. But just for that I need to have a clean start:
all those subdirs puzzle me: this is my little as possible.


Cheers, thanks,
Rodolfo




____________________________________________________________
Libero Flat, sempre a 4 Mega a 19,95 euro al mese! 
Abbonati subito su http://www.libero.it

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Sun,  4 Sep 2005 00:18:18 +0200, romeomedina\@libero\.it wrote:

> . But now, after receiving mail, another two dirs were created
> by gnus: 'mail' and 'mail/misc'. In fact, now my tree is the following:

[...]

> . Any idea of how to eliminate 'mail' and 'mail/misc'?
> I couldn't find an answer in the Manual.

Your email is put ("split") into one or more groups (you can think of
these as folders, if you like).

Try reading about that in the manual (the nodes "Getting Started
Reading Mail" and "Splitting Mail").

I would recommend reading more of the manual before trying to bend
Gnus over backwards into doing what you think it should :-)


  Best of luck,

-- 
 "Scare yourself into empty space                             Adam Sjøgren
  A distant star above the human race"                   asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: How to change the default ~/Mail and ~/News dirs with their subdirs?

[romeomedina]

.. I forgot: this might be important:
I put in ~/.gnus.el the following:

(setq gnus-select-method  '(nnml "received-mail"
				 (nnml-directory "~/mail/received-mail")
))

Rodolfo




____________________________________________________________
Libero Flat, sempre a 4 Mega a 19,95 euro al mese! 
Abbonati subito su http://www.libero.it