Re: which gnus files used to hold gnus state? (for manual)

[Andreas Fuchs <asf@void.at>]

Today, Kai Großjohann <kai.grossjohann@gmx.net> wrote:
> Then we have ~/.gnus-mail-crashbox or similar (forget the exact name)
> which plays a role similar to the ~/Mail/Incoming* files, but I don't
> know details.  Any experts out there who can help?

Not an expert, but had sufficient exposure to ~/.emacs-crash-box to be
able to comment on it.

It's a file in which a mail or mailbox gets saved which makes gnus wet
its pants - e.g. sometimes procmail, delivering to a maildir would open
a file, write "F" to it (for "From ..."), and at the same time, gnus
would open the file and try to rip it out from under procmail's
feet. Now, you have two parts: one ~/.emacs-crash-box with "F" in it,
and if you delete it, you get another with the rest of the mail,
starting with "rom ...". Happened to me all the time until I switched to
gnus-centric splitting via bbdb and split-fancy (-:

> Now let's talk about the ~/News directory.  It contains a number of
> files and subdirs, some related to news, some related to mail.  It's
> rather confusing, I'm afraid.

Right. it is. Seems to be artifacts from older days of gnusing.

> The cache is the older part of Gnus.  The cache is meant to be used
> manually by the user while browsing: the user hits some key and the
> article is entered into the cache.  This means that the article will
> stay around even after the server has expired it.  So, normally, the
> cache is only useful for nntp, and perhaps nnimap.  But of course you
> can count on creative abuses of the cache even for nnml and its ilk
> ;-)

The cache has always struck me as a very strange facility. Why would I
want an article around after I have read it (and not marked it as
ticked or dormant) anyway?

>> The overall goal would be to know exactly what files to sync if I
>> want to mirror my gnus setup on computer B from computer A. Hopefully
>> in the next generation of gnus there will be a list of
>> state-containing files and an automated way to sync them
>> (gnus-sync-state-files with a configurable sync command like "rsync
>> -e ssh ..."). This could be useful for users who use a laptop and
>> want to sync before going on the road.
> 
> Nifty.
> 
> 
> If you want to replicate the cache, replicate ~/News/cache.  Similar
> for the agent.  And for mail, replicate ~/Mail.

If I might suggest here the use (but first, implementation for gnus) of
RMS, the Robust Mail Store. It seemed like a great idea when I first
read the paper. Maybe you can snarf some ideas from it, too.

http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/papers/mailstore.pdf

> But in these cases, you also have the active file problem.  Hm.

See the URL for a possibly complete solution to that problem.

HTH,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <asf@acm.org>, asf@jabber.at, antifuchs
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