Re: how to kill a virtual group

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>> Because the two kinds of server need to be treated
>> separately. Gnus is not allowed to overwrite your gnus.el
>> file, so if you want to make a change to a server defined
>> there, Gnus can't do it via the *Server* buffer: you have to
>> shut Gnus down, edit gnus.el, and restart. Conversely,
>> servers defined via the *Server* buffer are saved in
>> .newsrc.eld, which only Gnus is supposed to touch, so edits
>> should be made via the *Server* buffer. Gnus needs to know
>> which servers are which.
>
> In general, stuff that are the same, it shouldn't matter where
> or in what manner they are defined.

In principle I agree, but in this case I think it's pretty useful to
have the ability to define servers in a config file, that's maybe
version controlled, but then also have the ability to create and destroy
servers on the fly within Gnus.

> If they are not the same, then if something should or
> shouldn't happen to them because of that, they should have
> something so one can check - if they by accident look the
> same, add some flag or something to the data
> structure perhaps?

In this case, I think the check is *supposed* to be whether the server
is present in `gnus-(secondary-)select-method(s)', or whether it is
present in `gnus-server-alist'.

In theory it's a clean way to do it, because the first two variables are
simply loaded from your .gnus.el and never modified, and the second
variable is loaded from and saved to .newsrc.el by Gnus, which is
allowed to modify the variable. It's just that something seems to not be
working correctly there.