Re: nnimap problem solved by removing .agentview and .overview

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

"Steven E. Harris" <seh@panix.com> writes:

>> For flags, syncing ~/News/marks/ should suffice, if the marks stuff
>> is working for nntp.
>
> Looking in some of the .marks files under my ~/[News]/marks directory,
> I see that there is a "read" sexp with ranges that match .newsrc. So
> perhaps .marks is /all/ I need to sync NNTP.
>
> Can anyone comment on how Gnus reconciles differences between the
> .marks files and .newsrc[.eld]? Which ones will take precedence?

.marks will take precedence, that was the reason for introducing the
"marks" backend interface.  I.e., to allow backends to override what
Gnus knows about groups (from newsrc.eld).  Nnimap uses this to tell
Gnus about flag changes on the server.  Later it was realized that
nnml and nnfolder could benefit from the same interface, to allow
synchronization of nnml/nnfolder's to carry flags with them.

>> Can anyone comment on how Gnus reconciles differences between the
>> .marks files and .newsrc[.eld]? Which ones will take precedence?
>
> Following up to myself, I just tried an experiment. I exited Gnus and
> manually edited one of my .marks files to back off the read range by a
> single message, leaving the corresponding entries in .newsrc and
> .newsrc.eld untouched. Upon restarting Gnus, the Group and Summary
> buffer reflected that I had not read the last article in the edited
> group.
>
> So it does seem that if NNTP can be synced with the .marks files, and
> IMAP groups don't need .newsrc.eld, then I can stop syncing .newsrc
> and .newsrc.eld -- topic changes notwithstanding.

Yup.

> Are there any files that nnimap groups do need synced, or can they
> recover /everything/ Gnus knows about them from the server?

Some esoteric things aren't synced via the server.  For example:
bookmarks, group parameters (but use `gnus-parameters' instead),
topics.  I think we've eliminated all major values.

To see what is stored in .newsrc.eld for a group, type `G E' on it.
Anything there you don't see in .marks won't be synced.