Problems with Easynews active file (with patch)

Problems with Easynews active file (with patch)

[Barry Fishman]

A question about this was posted by Hynek Schlawack on Oct 7 but
did not receive a response.

> 1) Server-Browsing (^) of Easynews fails after some groups with the error:
>
> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument number-or-marker-p
> Wellfleet)
>   gnus-browse-foreign-server("nntp:news.easynews.com" #<buffer *Server*≥)
>   gnus-server-read-server("nntp:news.easynews.com")
>   call-interactively(gnus-server-read-server)

This is due to easynews containing several bogus lines in its
"list active" response, such as:

comp.dcom.sys.wellfleet Wellfleet bridge router

I set a message about the problem to EasyNews support.

One can patch around this by changing gnus-ignored-newsgroups to:

(setq gnus-ignored-newsgroups
      (mapconcat 'identity
                 '("^to\\."                 ; not "real" groups
                   "^[0-9. \t]+\\( \\|$\\)" ; all digits in name
                   "^[\"][]\"[#'()]"        ; bogus characters
                   "^[^ ]+ [^0-9]+$"        ; No digits fields (for easynews)
                   )
                 "\\|"))

But shouldn't gnus-browse-foreign-server validate the numeric fields
before using them, as is done in gnus-active-to-gnus-format?

The following patch seems to work:

Index: gnus-srvr.el
===================================================================
RCS file: /usr/local/cvsroot/gnus/lisp/gnus-srvr.el,v
retrieving revision 7.33
diff -c -r7.33 gnus-srvr.el
*** gnus-srvr.el	20 Jan 2008 05:23:57 -0000	7.33
--- gnus-srvr.el	16 Feb 2008 18:03:02 -0000
***************
*** 726,741 ****
  	  (if (eq (car method) 'nntp)
  	      (while (not (eobp))
  		(ignore-errors
! 		  (push (cons
! 			 (mm-string-as-unibyte
! 			  (buffer-substring
! 			   (point)
! 			   (progn
! 			     (skip-chars-forward "^ \t")
! 			     (point))))
! 			 (let ((last (read cur)))
! 			   (cons (read cur) last)))
! 			groups))
  		(forward-line))
  	    (while (not (eobp))
  	      (ignore-errors
--- 726,743 ----
  	  (if (eq (car method) 'nntp)
  	      (while (not (eobp))
  		(ignore-errors
! 		  (let ((group (cons
! 				(mm-string-as-unibyte
! 				 (buffer-substring
! 				  (point)
! 				  (progn
! 				    (skip-chars-forward "^ \t")
! 				    (point))))
! 				(let ((last (read cur)))
! 				  (cons (read cur) last)))))
! 		    (if (and (numberp (cadr group))
! 			     (numberp (cddr group)))
! 			(push group groups))))
  		(forward-line))
  	    (while (not (eobp))
  	      (ignore-errors


-- 
Barry Fishman