Agent woes

Agent woes

[Lars Balker Rasmussen]

This is only half a bug report, because I'm not entirely sure excactly
what happens:

For agentized groups, Gnus keeps an active file in 
	.../agent/nntp/news.server/agent.lib/active
which should keep track of the articles contained under 
	.../agent/nntp/news.server/group/name

It appears that pressing 'g' in a plugged session causes the active
file to be changed, viz:

d:\news\agent\nntp\news.image.dk\agent.lib>diff active "Copy of active"
1c1
< alt.religion.kibology 442887 442842 y
---
> alt.religion.kibology 442887 442789 y
5c5
< dk.kultur.film 1381 970 y
---
> dk.kultur.film 1379 970 y

Note that new articles appeared in the dk.* group, but OLD articles
were taken away in the alt.* group!  These articles are then
completely inaccessible from within Gnus, though they remain in the
agent-directory.

I changed the active file to contain all the articles after becoming
suspicious.  Are there any other places this information is mirrored?
(The group in question is not cached, though that didn't change
anything when I tried.)

Surely one of the benefits of the agent should be to defeat expire
times on newsservers?
-- 
Lars Balker Rasmussen                                                 "No."

Re: Agent woes

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Balker Rasmussen <lbr@image.dk> writes:

> It appears that pressing 'g' in a plugged session causes the active
> file to be changed, viz:

Yes; the Agent simply stores a copy of the active entries from the
server.  This is bogus...

> Note that new articles appeared in the dk.* group, but OLD articles
> were taken away in the alt.* group!  These articles are then
> completely inaccessible from within Gnus, though they remain in the
> agent-directory.

... as you've found out here.  The Agent should tippy-toe around here
a bit to get the lower limit right, but I haven't gotten around to it
yet.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen