Trying to document some of gnus' darkish corners -- please help.

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gnu.emacs.gnus as well.


(If it's impolite to post this issue to both the newsgroup and the
 ding list, then just let me know and I'll be more careful in the
 future, but I suspected the audiences were different and that both
 might be interested and able to help.)

I've had a fairly painful set of experiences with gnus over the past
few years where what I thought it was going to do, and what it did
were two different things.  To some extent, this was my fault for
assuming that things would actually work the way that I considered
reasonable, but to some extent, I think clearer docs would have saved
me.

As a result, I'm interested in trying to figure out what the current
state of affairs is with respect to a few issues, and to help
(re)write some info docs to clear these things up.  Along those lines,
I'd like to see who knows the answers to any or all of the following
questions.  Please try and be careful to either make sure you're sure
you're right, or just make it clear that you're not sure.  Some of the
problems I've had in the past came from people making suggestions that
sounded like they should have worked, but actually didn't because Gnus
hadn't quite fully implemented X or Y feature that interacted badly
with the change they suggested.  I'm happy to double check things as
long as I know I need to.

I'd also like to answer these questions just because it'll make it
clearer what the overall intent/design of the current architecture is.

  1) Is gnus supposed to preserve article marks across backend
     respools (B r)?  If not, why not, and also if not, then might it
     make sense to add a separate command that *will* preserve the
     marks?  (I just lost about 1400 marks because I forgot that gnus
     would clobber them in this situation -- kinda painful).

  2) When you mark a crossposted article, what's supposed to happen to
     the other copies?  I had assumed that when you marked a
     crossposted article, either all of the copies would get the same
     mark, or copies other than the one being directly marked would be
     left alone.  Neither seems to be the case.  Right now it seems
     that at least in some cases, the article you mark gets the mark
     you indicate, and the crossposted copies get a different mark (in
     my experience the copies are marked as read).  This seems worse
     than either of the two alternatives I mention above, though
     perhaps I'm missing something.

     The reason I noticed this is because I used to use the default
     expire mechanism (where you have to mark articles with 'E' to
     expire them) and then, at someone's suggestion, I turned on
     crossposting.  When I went to expire large numbers of crossposted
     articles, I just assumed that the other copies would either get
     expired or left alone (so that I'd have to expire them directly
     later).  What actually happened was that the other copies were
     just marked as read, not expired, and they sat around on disk
     until I noticed that my partition was filling up, and made me
     suspicious enough to investigate.

     Of course this is also potientially dangerous if you don't know
     about it and you're using total-expire.  Say you mark a
     crossposted article as urgent or dormant, and now it gets marked
     as read elsewhere which means it'll get deleted.  If this isn't
     what you expected, it could be bad.  So do the copies get marked
     as read?  Should they?  (I'll have to test this one and see.)

     I'm not sure what I'd like to see ideally, but it might be nice
     to have a flag you can set (or a separate command) that would
     have it just ask you what mark to give the crossposted copies
     when it notices that the article is crossposted.  I'm not sure
     that's feasible though.

     Alternately, I think either using the same mark everywhere, or
     not marking the copies at all, might be better, but as I said,
     perhaps I'm missing the justification for the current behavior.

These are the two main issues I've got right now.  It's not so much
that I want the behaviors changed, though that might be appropriate.
More importantly, I just want a clear understanding, and clear
documentation, of the status-quo so that I don't keep shooting myself
in the foot.

Thanks for any help.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930