No access/unplugged.. some thoughts

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

I hope this saga may help some others who have had trouble with access
when 'unplugged'

The problem of starting gnus 'unplugged' and then not having accesss to
the nntp groups has been mentioned several times here.	After searching
out some of the postings on that, their doesn't seem to have been a real
solid answer as to why.

The long file name issue is the usual point brought up.  Is it the case
that gnus-unplugged will not work with the long file names acitive?

This comment from the 'released' message of 0.27 looks to be about that
very thing.  Or is this addressing a different problem with long file names?
Apparently only related to nnml groups.

 > * gnus-agent.el (gnus-agent-group-path): Respect long file names.

I discovered today that the long file name variable was set to 't' : (
so set it to nil and proceeded to regenerate all the group files.

All my 'ticked' and 'cached' articles got uncached but stayed 'ticked' in this
process,  consequently all the ones that were older than the nntp
servers' expiration time got expired.  Bad news.

Made me glad I had copied the whole works to a safe place before
blundering around with it.

Now I have both kinds of file arrangements in News/cache.  Gnus can
still not be brought up 'unplugged' with access to the cached articles.
But at least now I can run 'J s' then go unplugged and have access to
every thing, unless a group had no new articles downloaded.

If a group has cached articles but no new ones were downloaded then gnus
will not access it when 'unplugged'.

~/News looks like this now:
newsguy                            gnu.emacs.sources
comp                               comp.os.linux.networking
alt                                comp.editors
linux                              comp.mail.sendmail
gnu                                comp.os.linux.misc
nntp+sunsite                       comp.os.linux.x
gnu.emacs.gnus                     nndir:
comp.emacs.xemacs                  comp.os.linux.setup
comp.emacs                         alt.test.only
nntp+sunsite.auc.dk:emacs.ding     comp.mail.pine
comp.mail.misc                     nntp+sunsite.auc.dk-1:emacs.ding
gnu.emacs.help                     nntp+sunsite.auc.dk-11:emacs.ding
linux.redhat.misc
Rh2:~/News/cache$ 

I suspect I will have to get rid of the old long file name dirs, to get Gnus
to behave like it wants to.

To check this a little,  I set up a fresh setup under a new account and
started with the long file name variable set to nil.

Glory be, on that set up Gnus can be started 'unplugged' once an initial
'J s'  has been done.

But I find again that a group where "New"articles haven't been added
(even if some are cached in that group)  Gnus will not access it when
'unplugged'.

It seems that when plugged, a simple <enter> on group must call a
different function than J s and that agent may not recognize the
'other' kind of download.  Is this true or am I barking up the wrong
tree.


I could use some advice on clearing out the long file name directories
and not losing all my cached stuff.

I can think of several ways to copy every thing back to their repective
groups but suspect I will be overlapping in many places and will end up
with lots of dups.

The information on dups in nntp groups indicates they can be made
invisible but apparently are still taking up HDD space.