Question from the distant past on posting-styles

Question from the distant past on posting-styles

[Andrew Cohen]

OK, I have a question that perhaps someone from the old days might know
about. In gnus-msg.el (gnus-setup-message) there is a cryptic comment
from "drv":

;; #### FIXME: for a reason that I did not manage to identify yet,
;; the variable `gnus-newsgroup-name' does not honor a dynamically
;; scoped or setq'ed value from a caller like `C-u gnus-summary-mail'.
;; After evaluation of @forms below, it gets the value we actually want
;; to override, and the posting styles are used. For that reason, I've
;; added an optional argument to `gnus-configure-posting-styles' to
;; make sure that the correct value for the group name is used. -- drv


and corresponding comments in gnus-group-mail, gnus-group-news, and
gnus-summary-mail-other-window:

;; We can't `let' gnus-newsgroup-name here, since that leads
;; to local variables leaking.


I can't quite understand the comments, but I tried just changing things
to use 'let and it seems to work (I tried some posting-styles and they
were picked up correctly).

The use of setq seems to stomp all over the buffer-local values of
gnus-newsgroup-name. Usually this doesn't cause problems but I finally
traced a rare bug to this (I had a case where setting up a message
buffer fails because of a problem with bbdb; then the original value of
gnus-newsgroup-name doesn't get restored and this causes some problems
down the road).

I would like to change all this to use let and dispense with the
setqs. Does anybody remember the issue?

Best,
Andy