Re: [Workaround/Solved] This bug is killing me!

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Tue Aug 30 2011, James Cloos <cloos-AT-jhcloos.com> wrote:

>>>>>> "DA" == Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
>
> DA> By what? (not challenging; just not understanding yet).
>
> I use dbmail.  It only supports seen, answered, deleted, flagged, recent
> and draft.  Notably there is no server-side flag to match with tick.

I thought that was "flagged"(?)

>>> Setting it to t would certainly break things here.
>
> DA> Where; what things?
>
> Gnus needs to keep marks other than the above in the .newsrc.el file; if
> it only tries to store them remotely it will fail.

IIUC gnus-propagate-marks is supposed to store them in both places.  At
least, that's what the docstring clearly implies:

,----[ C-h v gnus-propagate-marks RET ]
| gnus-propagate-marks is a variable defined in `gnus-sum.el'.
| Its value is nil
| 
| Documentation:
| If non-nil, Gnus will store and retrieve marks from the backends.
| This means that marks will be stored both in .newsrc.eld and in
| the backend, and will slow operation down somewhat.
| 
| You can customize this variable.
| 
| [back]
`----

>>> Gnus needs to work correcly with gnus-propagate-marks nil.
>
> DA> Perhaps so.  Can you define what "correctly" means in this case?
>
> Store the flags in .newsrc.eld and use them.  As it is, ticked articles
> confuse the unread counts in Group enough that gnus even tries to open
> the group when it should pass over.  (There is some variation depending
> on which version of gnus I was running when each article was ticked.)
>
> Everything worked fine, incidently, until gnus started trying to store
> everything on the imap server.

Huh.  Well, for you, I guess.  My friend had a different experience.
There really ought to be some kind of testing framework for Gnus,
shouldn't there?  I suppose someone has already been thinking about
this in more depth...(?)

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com