Re: couple of questions about servers and agent

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

NAGY Andras <nagya@inf.elte.hu> writes:

> In the Server buffer, why do {nntp:news} and {nnml:mail} appear twice?

You probably subscribed to groups on that server and later changed the
server definition.  Gnus then re-create the server, and you get two
servers that looks identical but really isn't.  Solution is to G e on
groups and make sure it is equal to your current server definition, or
a "nntp:news" reference name.

> My nntp:news backend became quite unstable recently, so I decided to
> agentize it.  Pushed `J a' on it in the Server buffer, and while
> online, used `J s' to fetch all unread articles into the cache.  Due
> to the server being unstable, the downloading timed out, but the agent
> displayed "Finished fetching articles into the Gnus agent", altough it
> should have displayed some kind of error message, I believe.  

Exactly how did the server fail?  If you can track it down to the Gnus
function that failed, it would help.

> I decided to go on with the partially downloaded news.

IMHO this should work just fine.  Gnus should never bail out because
disk structures are corrupt, it should just cope.

> After going offline, Gnus still tried `sometimes' to contact the
> (unavailable) server.  May this be related to the server being listed
> twice in the server buffer, but only one instance being marked as
> `(agent)' ?  

I think so.  You only agentized one of the servers, most likely.

> Actually, not even the partially downloaded groups were readable
> offline.

Hm.  What happened?  Were there any information in the
~/News/agent/server/group directory?

> I'm confused.  Is the Agent such non-robust, or am I doing something
> wrong?

I'm not sure, every time I try to use the agent I feel like running
into some limitation or other, but I usually tell myself it is because
I'm using the agent differently than what was intended.