Re: nnml suddenly not activating groups on startup

[Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>]

Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk> writes:

> Could it be that an .overview or .marks file, that nnml stores in each
> folder, got corrupted?

>   $ ls -l Mail/normal/.overview Mail/normal/.marks 
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 asjo asjo    6032 Feb 15  2012 Mail/normal/.marks
>   -rw------- 1 asjo asjo 5606188 Aug 25 21:49 Mail/normal/.overview
>   $ 

> It's a long shot, but was what sprung to mind as another place that Gnus
> stores state for nnml.

It looks like the .marks files aren't used any more (mine were all last
updated in 2014).  I regenerated overview with no change.

I did find a proximate cause, but I don't understand it.  I noticed that a
few nnml groups were activated by default but most weren't, so I inspected
the group data with G E.  The nnml groups that were activated have
(nnml "") as the last element of their data.  The ones that aren't
activated have "nnml:"  as the last element of their data.  Presumably I
can fix this by editing all of the group metadata accordingly, but I think
new groups are created using the "nnml:" syntax.

I vaguely recall seeing soemthing on StackOverflow that said this was an
intentional change from some time back, but it seems to suddenly be
causing me problems?  The two things that happened right before this
problem started was that I aborted several "g" new-news checks, and I
added an NNTP group with a new secondary server.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>