Feature request: Keepng meta-data out of newsrc.eld

Feature request: Keepng meta-data out of newsrc.eld

[Jari Aalto+mail.emacs]

Would it be possible to take out 

-   Group-specific information
-   Topic layout information
-   other meta-data 

and store these separate file out of newsrc.eld? I had an unfortunate
event the other day when downloading 4-years of archived mail
and integrating them into one virtual group for searching.
I dind have lot's of virtual memory, but somehow Emacs couldn't
allocate - or allocated only form physhical heap memory - I don't
know.

The net effect was that during creating the M-g virtual group, I got
"memory exhausted" and trying to save at least some, gnus/emacs
trashed my newsrc.el.

It was kind of a prayer moment looking at completely empty newsrc.eld.


Now I'm in a process of recreating everyting and I'm more convinced
that the meta-data should now be in one big newsrc.eld. It could hold
only the article numbers and ranges and stuff. The mailing list
parameters (to-list et all,) could be easily restored from separate
files, because the group informations does not much chnage once you
get it the way you want.

Any chance of looking on this?

Another idea could be to implement a "dump" that would generate
metadata out of the newsrc.el and a "re-dump" to restore the
metadata in event of failure. This could be a kind of 
backup system

I gather that, it doesn't make sense to backup newsrc.eld, because
it stores the article numbers, which keep changing, but the metadata 
could be backuppped easily, because it doensät change much if none
at all in the end.

Any comments?
Jari

Re: Feature request: Keepng meta-data out of newsrc.eld

[Simon Josefsson]

posting-list@MailAndNews.com (Jari Aalto+mail.emacs) writes:

> Would it be possible to take out
>
> -   Group-specific information Topic layout information other 
> -   meta-data
>
> and store these separate file out of newsrc.eld?

Yes.  Using customize for some of the things, e.g. topics, 
shouldn't be too difficult, but splitting up `gnus-newsrc-alist' 
requires some more work.  I'd like this to happen, so given some 
spare time it might happen..

> Now I'm in a process of recreating everyting and I'm more 
> convinced that the meta-data should now be in one big 
> newsrc.eld. It could hold only the article numbers and ranges 
> and stuff. The mailing list parameters (to-list et all,) could 
> be easily restored from separate files, because the group 
> informations does not much chnage once you get it the way you 
> want.

Yup.

> Another idea could be to implement a "dump" that would generate 
> metadata out of the newsrc.el and a "re-dump" to restore the 
> metadata in event of failure. This could be a kind of  backup 
> system

Sounds complicated, maybe keeping it simple is better.