Re: Gnus v5.4.62 is released

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Sudish Joseph <sj@eng.mindspring.net> writes:

> >> I beg to differ. from the beginners point it's still a bit difficult
> >> to set up a gnus environment.
> 
> > Exactly.  Which is why Gnus should provide the most palatable
> > behaviour by default.  And I still think this category includes /not/
> > creating 100K+ .newsrc.eld by default.
> 
> FWIW, I'm totally with Jens here.  
> 
> A lot of the listing/jumping/subscribing commands work off of the
> killed list, as does newsgroup name completion.
[...]
> I quickly learnt to set save-killed-list to t when I left OSU with
> it's small active file to a server with a reasonable number of
> groups.

With the new default of `gnus-read-active-file' to `some', the killed
list will never have been constructed in the first place.

> Finally, I do not understand why disk space is the critical resource
> in this instance.

I didn't say it was the "critical resource" -- it's only a matter of
well-behaving.  Programs that save such large files by default don't
look well-behaving to me.  YMMV.

A practical reason is that there are people trying to run Gnus in a
multiuser environment, where they have a quota.  The size of
.newsrc.eld can matter to them.

> OTOH, the thing about save-killed-list that annoys me most is the
> additional time taken to save .newsrc.eld.  We can address that in
> other ways than to default to not saving killed-list.

How?

> Since it's largest component is the list of killed groups, and since
> that list is changed infrequently, it could be split out to a
> separate file (which could even be loaded only on demand, if
> needed).

Here you have touched a separate issue, which is caching of
server-side data.  For instance, Gnus might be much more useful if it
cached things like newsgroups list, newsgroup descriptions, and even
XOVER info, locally (Netscape 4 newsreader caches XOVER).

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
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