a few questions about the agent

a few questions about the agent

[Dan Christensen]

I've just started using the agent with pgnus-0.84 and have a few
questions.

1) I have mail delivered to local spool files, but Gnus won't read
these spool files when it is unplugged.  (My mail backend is nnfolder,
and it is not registered with the agent.)  Since I don't read from
a pop server, there is no reason for Gnus to be plugged when reading
mail.  Am I doing something wrong?

2) When I start gnus with gnus-unplugged, various hooks don't seem to
be run.  For example, in my .gnus I have:

(add-hook 'gnus-sum-load-hook 
'(lambda nil
   (define-key gnus-summary-mode-map "\C-i" 'jdc-gnus-summary-toggle-processable)
   (define-key gnus-summary-mode-map "J" 'jdc-gnus-group-select-a-group)
   (define-key gnus-summary-mode-map "i" 'jdc-gnus-group-select-inbox)
   (define-key gnus-summary-mode-map "/e" 'jdc-gnus-summary-limit-exclude-unwanted)
))
               
After entering a summary buffer, the value of gnus-sum-load-hook is
the lambda expression above, but gnus-summary-mode-map does not
contain my customizations.  Similar things happen in other buffers.

3) When I'm in a rush, or only have access to an expensive connection,
I only want the agent to download headers and articles for the groups
I think are most important.  I thought maybe I could create a category
called "important", which lists the important groups, and have the
rest be in the default category.  But if I do this, how do I tell the
agent which categories I want it to use for this particular session?
I guess I could change the predicate in default category to false when
I only want to see important articles, but that seems a bit awkward.
I also thought of adjusting gnus-agent-handle-level up and down as
appropriate, but again this is awkward, and I already use levels to
indicate other information.  Any other ideas?

4) I saw a patch for using nnimap with the agent.  Has anyone been
using this?  Does it work well?  I've only started playing with
nnimap.

Thanks for any help,

Dan

-- 
Dan Christensen
jdc@math.jhu.edu

Re: a few questions about the agent

[Matt Pharr]

Dan Christensen <jdc@jhu.edu> writes:
> I've just started using the agent with pgnus-0.84 and have a few
> questions.
> 
> 1) I have mail delivered to local spool files, but Gnus won't read
> these spool files when it is unplugged.  (My mail backend is nnfolder,
> and it is not registered with the agent.)  Since I don't read from
> a pop server, there is no reason for Gnus to be plugged when reading
> mail.  Am I doing something wrong?

I'm having this problem, too--I'm using slrnpull to handle news (thanks to
Kai (I think) and Jean-Albert Ferrez for tips on the slrnpull/rsync combo),
and so I don't want the agent to worry about any article management--I just
want the functionality of the queueing stuff for mail/news that I send when 
I'm unplugged.

However, each time I start up gnus-unplugged, I need to go into the server
buffer and J r my nnspool server--somehow it doesn't ever seem to remember
that I've J r'd it before.  Any ideas?  Where does gnus store the info
about which servers the agent is going to pay attention to, anyway?

-matt
-- 
Matt Pharr                                   mmp@graphics.stanford.edu
<URL:http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mmp>

Re: a few questions about the agent

[Harry Putnam]

Matt Pharr <mmp@Graphics.Stanford.EDU> writes:

> Dan Christensen <jdc@jhu.edu> writes:
> > I've just started using the agent with pgnus-0.84 and have a few
> > questions.
> > 
> > 1) I have mail delivered to local spool files, but Gnus won't read
> > these spool files when it is unplugged.  (My mail backend is nnfolder,
> > and it is not registered with the agent.)  Since I don't read from
> > a pop server, there is no reason for Gnus to be plugged when reading
> > mail.  Am I doing something wrong?
> 
> I'm having this problem, too--I'm using slrnpull to handle news (thanks to
> Kai (I think) and Jean-Albert Ferrez for tips on the slrnpull/rsync combo),
> and so I don't want the agent to worry about any article management--I just
> want the functionality of the queueing stuff for mail/news that I send when 
> I'm unplugged.
> 
> However, each time I start up gnus-unplugged, I need to go into the server
> buffer and J r my nnspool server--somehow it doesn't ever seem to remember
> that I've J r'd it before.  Any ideas?  Where does gnus store the info
> about which servers the agent is going to pay attention to, anyway?


News/agent/lib/servers

They only show up there if you've `J a'ed something besides the default
gnus-select-method.... I think.

Re: a few questions about the agent

[Matt Pharr]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> Matt Pharr <mmp@Graphics.Stanford.EDU> writes:
> > 
> > I'm having this problem, too--I'm using slrnpull to handle news (thanks to
> > Kai (I think) and Jean-Albert Ferrez for tips on the slrnpull/rsync combo),
> > and so I don't want the agent to worry about any article management--I just
> > want the functionality of the queueing stuff for mail/news that I send when 
> > I'm unplugged.
> > 
> > However, each time I start up gnus-unplugged, I need to go into the server
> > buffer and J r my nnspool server--somehow it doesn't ever seem to remember
> > that I've J r'd it before.  Any ideas?  Where does gnus store the info
> > about which servers the agent is going to pay attention to, anyway?
> 
> News/agent/lib/servers
> 
> They only show up there if you've `J a'ed something besides the default
> gnus-select-method.... I think.

Aha.

So agent/lib/servers has just 'nil' in it, as I'd expect.  However, I
notice that gnus-agentize has the following code in it:

  (unless gnus-agent-covered-methods
    (setq gnus-agent-covered-methods (list gnus-select-method))))

which explains why it keeps thinking that it wants to agentize my nnspool:
server.  Why should it be doing this?  I suggest that it's a bug, though
assume that there's some reason for it to have been added.  Maybe the
intent was so that the first time the agent is started it makes a
reasonable guess for what to agentize?

I've 'fixed' this by just setting gnus-agent-covered-methods to nil right
after I (gnus-agentize) in my .gnus.el, but this seems like it shouldn't be 
necessary...

-matt
-- 
Matt Pharr                                   mmp@graphics.stanford.edu
<URL:http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mmp>

Re: a few questions about the agent

[Harry Putnam]

Dan Christensen <jdc@jhu.edu> writes:

> I've just started using the agent with pgnus-0.84 and have a few
> questions.
> 
> 3) When I'm in a rush, or only have access to an expensive connection,
> I only want the agent to download headers and articles for the groups
> I think are most important.  I thought maybe I could create a category
> called "important", which lists the important groups, and have the
> rest be in the default category.  But if I do this, how do I tell the
> agent which categories I want it to use for this particular session?
> I guess I could change the predicate in default category to false when
> I only want to see important articles, but that seems a bit awkward.
> I also thought of adjusting gnus-agent-handle-level up and down as
> appropriate, but again this is awkward, and I already use levels to
> indicate other information.  Any other ideas?

I hope someone proves me wrong but I don't think there is a way to
handily and quickly rearrange agent categories in the way you
describe.  I think we need an all inclusive interface in `J c' that
allows one to edit all aspects of the category at one time.  It would
also be nice (maybe already possible ) to see agent information in
group buffer such as a mark of somekind indicating which groups are in
which categories.

That said, there is the mechanical way of creating a file called
tmp.categories that contains the  setup you want for downloading when
in a hurry.  And creating a backup of your normal
News/agent/lib/categories called categories.bak then copy
tmp.categories to News/agent/lib/categories   when in a hurry. Copy
categories.bak to News/agent/lib/categores when in normal mode.

Not sure what kind of hell this may raise with other files though.