gnus startup aborting due to unreachable nnrss groups

gnus startup aborting due to unreachable nnrss groups

[Ken Coleman]

Hi everyone,

I have been chasing down an issue where gnus would abort startup when
it couldn't contact a website to get an nnrss group.  This is my first
foray into gnus hacking, so bear with me.

Basically the issue seems to result from using an external program to
perform the http: fetch vs. emacs's internal slurping capabilities.
In particular, I am using:

(setq mm-url-use-external t)

to have an external program (wget) grab the RSS feed.  The reason is
simple performance - emacs works fine, but using wget is much much
faster.  However, when wget fails (site is down for maintenance or is
slashdotted or whatever), gnus startup aborts and doesn't ever build
the *Group* buffer.  Using internal fetching doesn't cause this
problem, but is considerably slower.

I traced the issue down to the external program failure signalling an
"error", and nothing in the gnus call tree catching the error, and so
the startup aborts.  I have attached a small diff that corrects this
particular issue for me, but I'm curious to get the opinions of actual
gnus developers regarding its appropriateness.  Basically the change
is to also catch "error"s in gnus-activate-group where we are
currently catching "quit"s.  In fact, all I had to do was uncomment
the (error nil) that was already there.

It was originally commented out in revision 5.37 of gnus-start.el, but
I couldn't really figure out why from the logs.

Anyways, that's about all I've got.  Let me know if there is anything
else I can do on this front.

Thanks in advance for any advice/assistance on this issue!

- Ken.
ken_coleman@iname.com

Index: lisp/gnus-start.el
===================================================================
RCS file: /usr/local/cvsroot/gnus/lisp/gnus-start.el,v
retrieving revision 7.23
diff -u -r7.23 gnus-start.el
--- lisp/gnus-start.el  19 Sep 2004 20:24:27 -0000      7.23
+++ lisp/gnus-start.el  24 Sep 2004 01:42:07 -0000
@@ -1504,7 +1504,7 @@
             (inline (gnus-request-group group dont-check method))
           (condition-case nil
               (inline (gnus-request-group group dont-check method))
-            ;;(error nil)
+            (error nil)
             (quit
              (message "Quit activating %s" group)
              nil)))

Re: gnus startup aborting due to unreachable nnrss groups

[Ken Coleman]

Ken Coleman <ken_coleman@iname.com> writes:

> I have been chasing down an issue where gnus would abort startup when
> it couldn't contact a website to get an nnrss group.  This is my first
> foray into gnus hacking, so bear with me.
>
> ... further description and a patch cut ...

Just wondering if I've asked my question in the wrong place?  This
group seems pretty active for all queries but mine, so I have to
wonder if that's the issue.

Also, it appears that I'm not the only one having this problem.
Michael Schierl was inquiring about what seems to be the same issue
back in May.  There were responses to it, but no resolution ended up
in the group - possibly via email only?

Thanks in advance for any assistance/pointers!
- Ken.
ken_coleman@iname.com