Hi Alex,

 || On 08 Apr 2001 21:19:39 +0200
 || Alex Schroeder <alex@gnu.org> wrote: 

 >> For synchronizing email across several machines, I used to sync
 >> ...
 >> minutes over a 64k ISDN line.)

 as> Hm, I didn't ask this, so maybe it is irrelevant -- but how did
 as> you sync this exactly?  Assume you have an nnml directory
 as> ~/Mail/emacs on two machines, both machines get mail.  Doesn't
 as> that mean that for each filename a mail exists on either machine
 as> -- and there is no guaranty that the file contains the same mail?
 as> Then sync would by impossible, right?

Not quite. You'd get a lot of duplicate messages, but that shouldn't
hurt. The limiting factor is that with this setup, gnus MUST never run
on more than ONE of the machines.

This seems to be a standard problem - if gnus had a pre-startup check
for a lockfile (let's say a file called "lock" in the Mail directory),
this could easily be solved.

What about this behaviour:

 Only if the machine name in the lockfile matches the local host, gnus
 starts up. 

 If no lockfile is present, it creates it and writes the local
 hostname into it.

 The lockfile is among the synced files. 

Then the lockfile could also be used to determine the direction of the
file-sync. After the sync, the lockfile is deleted.

That should be a little safer, at least.

Regards,
                Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                       <greve@gnu.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Brave GNU World	                           (http://brave-gnu-world.org)