Improving dribble data handling

Improving dribble data handling

[Katsumi Yamaoka]

Hi,

You may see the dribble buffer and the dribble file get pretty
big if you use Gnus all day long without saving .newsrc.eld.
I tried improving Gnus' dribble data handling so as to prevent
the dribble buffer from growing infinitely and not to add
unnecessary dribble entry in which newsgroup info is unchanged.

What this does:
   When adding a new newsgroup info for a certain group to the
 dribble buffer, old entries for the same group will be deleted.
   Dribble data won't be added when quitting from a group with
 no update (i.e., the `Q' summary command).

The present patch is here:
   http://www.jpl.org/ftp/pub/tmp/gnus-dribble.patch

I'll get along with it for some days and install to Gnus git,
hopefully.

Re: Improving dribble data handling

[Peter Münster]

Hello,

In the past, sometimes I killed the dribble buffer accidently, and
afterwards, after a restart of emacs, the marks in the group were messed
up.

Now I use Gnus happily without dribble buffer:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(setq gnus-use-dribble-file    nil
      gnus-read-newsrc-file    nil
      gnus-save-newsrc-file    nil)
(gnus-demon-add-handler 'gnus-group-save-newsrc 5 2)
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

So, what are the advantages of a dribble file?

(IMO: fewer files = less trouble ;)

-- 
           Peter

Re: Improving dribble data handling

[Katsumi Yamaoka]

Peter Münster wrote:
> Hello,

> In the past, sometimes I killed the dribble buffer accidently, and
> afterwards, after a restart of emacs, the marks in the group were messed
> up.

> Now I use Gnus happily without dribble buffer:

> (setq gnus-use-dribble-file    nil
>       gnus-read-newsrc-file    nil
>       gnus-save-newsrc-file    nil)
> (gnus-demon-add-handler 'gnus-group-save-newsrc 5 2)

Oh, you saves it very frequently.  That's good (I sometimes type
`s' when I exit a summary buffer instead, though).  But I wouldn't
like to make it be Gnus' default, because sometimes I don't want
to save it.  For instance, if I catch-up all articles in a group
accidentally, I launch another Emacs and Gnus before saving the
newsrc.

> So, what are the advantages of a dribble file?

Bzr Emacs sometimes crashes suddenly.  In such a case the dribble
file is helpful.

> (IMO: fewer files = less trouble ;)

Agreed.  But the idea of the dribble file is not so bad, I think.