Flags/marks not being updated

Flags/marks not being updated

[Ralf Angeli]

Under certain circumstances flags or marks are not being updated
anymore.  I am often online via a flaky modem connection.  In that
case probing of news servers upon starting up Gnus may timeout (or I
abort the check with C-g).  This often happens for the first server
to be checked while the next one succeeds.  If in this case Gnus and
Emacs are closed and started anew, the flags will remain what they
were before.  I can go online, check servers and mark all messages as
read but after restarting Gnus/Emacs (restarting Gnus alone does not
exhibit the problem) the unread messages show up again.

In order to verify this, I deleted my .newsrc.eld (.newsrc is not
being read or saved due to `gnus-read-newsrc-file' and
`gnus-save-newsrc-file nil' both being nil) and the ~/News/agent/ and
~/News/marks/ directories and recreated my setup.  All goes well until
an abort like described above occurs.  This was tested with a CVS
checkout from June 25th.

Looking through lisp/ChangeLog I saw that in midth May some new code
related to marks was checked in and the default of
`gnus-agent-synchronize-flags' was set to nil.  So I tried to
synchronize the flags manually by issueing J-Y in the group buffer
but this produced an error with the following backtrace:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
  expand-file-name(nil "/home/angeli/News/marks/<server>/path/to/group/")
  nntp-open-marks("<group>" "<server>")
  nntp-request-set-mark("<group>" (((89886) add (read))) "<server>")
  eval((nntp-request-set-mark "<group>" (quote (...)) "<server>"))
  gnus-agent-synchronize-flags-server((nntp "<server>"))
  gnus-agent-synchronize-flags()
  call-interactively(gnus-agent-synchronize-flags)

That means, `nntp-marks-file-name' is nil in this case.

I don't really know where to start debugging all this stuff because I
don't know how the marks functionality is related to the agent
flags.  For example, I have many `nntp-request-set-mark' entries in
the ~/News/agent/nntp/<server>/agent.lib/flags files.  Should those
be used in some way?

Hopefully somebody can verify the problem or give me a hint what I am
doing wrong.

-- 
Ralf

Re: Flags/marks not being updated

[Simon Josefsson]

Ralf Angeli <dev.null@iwi.uni-sb.de> writes:

> Under certain circumstances flags or marks are not being updated
> anymore.  I am often online via a flaky modem connection.  In that
> case probing of news servers upon starting up Gnus may timeout (or I
> abort the check with C-g).  This often happens for the first server
> to be checked while the next one succeeds.  If in this case Gnus and
> Emacs are closed and started anew, the flags will remain what they
> were before.  I can go online, check servers and mark all messages as
> read but after restarting Gnus/Emacs (restarting Gnus alone does not
> exhibit the problem) the unread messages show up again.
>
> In order to verify this, I deleted my .newsrc.eld (.newsrc is not
> being read or saved due to `gnus-read-newsrc-file' and
> `gnus-save-newsrc-file nil' both being nil) and the ~/News/agent/ and
> ~/News/marks/ directories and recreated my setup.  All goes well until
> an abort like described above occurs.  This was tested with a CVS
> checkout from June 25th.
>
> Looking through lisp/ChangeLog I saw that in midth May some new code
> related to marks was checked in and the default of
> `gnus-agent-synchronize-flags' was set to nil.  So I tried to
> synchronize the flags manually by issueing J-Y in the group buffer
> but this produced an error with the following backtrace:
>
> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
>   expand-file-name(nil "/home/angeli/News/marks/<server>/path/to/group/")
>   nntp-open-marks("<group>" "<server>")
>   nntp-request-set-mark("<group>" (((89886) add (read))) "<server>")
>   eval((nntp-request-set-mark "<group>" (quote (...)) "<server>"))
>   gnus-agent-synchronize-flags-server((nntp "<server>"))
>   gnus-agent-synchronize-flags()
>   call-interactively(gnus-agent-synchronize-flags)
>
> That means, `nntp-marks-file-name' is nil in this case.
>
> I don't really know where to start debugging all this stuff because I
> don't know how the marks functionality is related to the agent
> flags.  For example, I have many `nntp-request-set-mark' entries in
> the ~/News/agent/nntp/<server>/agent.lib/flags files.  Should those
> be used in some way?
>
> Hopefully somebody can verify the problem or give me a hint what I am
> doing wrong.

Does it help to (setq gnus-agent-synchronize-flags 'ask)?  I really
think that value should be the default, as you will lose flags with a
`nil' setting.  I don't know/understand why the default was changed.

The bug yielding the backtrace should be fixed independently of this,
though.

Re: Flags/marks not being updated

[Ralf Angeli]

* Simon Josefsson (2004-06-28) writes:

> Ralf Angeli <dev.null@iwi.uni-sb.de> writes:
>
>> Under certain circumstances flags or marks are not being updated
>> anymore.
[...]
>> Looking through lisp/ChangeLog I saw that in midth May some new code
>> related to marks was checked in and the default of
>> `gnus-agent-synchronize-flags' was set to nil.  So I tried to
>> synchronize the flags manually by issueing J-Y in the group buffer
>> but this produced an error with the following backtrace:
>>
>> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
[...]
> Does it help to (setq gnus-agent-synchronize-flags 'ask)?

Yes, this helps.  I thought that I would get the error mentioned
above if I set it to 'ask, so I didn't check it. (c%  Thank you!

> I really
> think that value should be the default, as you will lose flags with a
> `nil' setting.  I don't know/understand why the default was changed.

What I find interesting is that after setting it to 'ask, Gnus is
actually asking for the synchronization.  I don't recall that I ever
had to answer such a question before, even when the default was 'ask.
Before all the strange behavior started, Gnus only asked if I would
like to switch servers into online status upon typing J-j; no
synchronization question.  (I know that I can set it to t in order to
suppress the question.)

> The bug yielding the backtrace should be fixed independently of this,
> though.

Maybe it helps if I add that I issued J-Y with the agent in unplugged
state.

-- 
Ralf

Re: Flags/marks not being updated

[Simon Josefsson]

Ralf Angeli <dev.null@iwi.uni-sb.de> writes:

>> I really
>> think that value should be the default, as you will lose flags with a
>> `nil' setting.  I don't know/understand why the default was changed.
>
> What I find interesting is that after setting it to 'ask, Gnus is
> actually asking for the synchronization.  I don't recall that I ever
> had to answer such a question before, even when the default was 'ask.
> Before all the strange behavior started, Gnus only asked if I would
> like to switch servers into online status upon typing J-j; no
> synchronization question.  (I know that I can set it to t in order to
> suppress the question.)

Before, nntp servers didn't use marks, so the flags didn't need to be
synchronized when you connected the agent again.  So maybe it isn't
that surprising.

>> The bug yielding the backtrace should be fixed independently of this,
>> though.
>
> Maybe it helps if I add that I issued J-Y with the agent in unplugged
> state.

It shouldn't do anything in that case, as it need to be plugged to
synchronize the flags.