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

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

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

>> Is there a simple recipe for reproducing this?
>
> Here's my workflow:
>
> o At work, start Gnus in plugged mode. Read e-mail all day.
>
> o At the end of the day, by way of an rsync-dependent script, send all
>   my changed score files, ~/.newsrc, and ~/.newsrc.eld files to my
>   ISP's disk.
>   Note that I don't sync the agent directories. My understanding is
>   that those are for local cache management. As I want to have a
>   different cache at home, I leave it to Gnus to figure out the
>   appropriate caching operations.

I'm not completely sure, but there might be a problem with your
workflow.  The .newsrc.eld contain active info, and the agent may be
using the active info to decide which headers to download.  So what is
happening is pretty much this:

1. (work machine) active range in .newsrc is 1-4711, which match agent
   overview's.

2. (home machine) active range in .newsrc is 1-4711 (by way of rsync),
   which might not match agent overview's, because they were created
   when the active range was 1-4000 (yesterday).

3. (home machine) as you read new e-mail, the active range increase to
   1-5711, and the agent overview include 4711-5711 data.

4. (work machine) active range in .newsrc is 1-5711 (by way of rsync)
   but agent overview only has 1-4711.  the agent trusts 1-5711 and
   assumes 4711-5711 doesn't exist, and doesn't try to download them
   again.

In other words, you need to sync .overview too.

You may need to sync .agentview as well, but then again you might need
to _not_ sync .agentview.

In the worst case, there is some information in .agentview that need
to be rsync'ed and some information that need to not be rsync'ed.  If
so, we should probably try to separate the data that is local state,
i.e. cache directory, from the .newsrc state data.

If someone recalls exactly how the data in .agentview is used by the
agent, that would answer whether you need to sync it or not.  I don't
recall.

Perhaps you need to take a step back to solve this:

Exactly why are you syncing .newsrc* at all?

Messages flags are supposed to be synchronized via the IMAP server, so
there's no need to synchronize the files for them.  Most other data
that is stored in .newsrc.eld can be stored in .emacs or .gnus.  The
only major thing, that I recall, is that Topics structures can't be
defined except by via .newsrc.eld.

Getting rid of .newsrc.eld would be nice.  Move all setup related
things to .gnus, and all state data into ~/News or wherever they
belong.