Re: Flags/marks not being updated

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

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.