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From: Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk>
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Subject: Re: Compiled format specs in .newsrc.eld?
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 18:31:24 +0200
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jas@extundo.com (Simon Josefsson) writes:

>> There's no difference for summary buffer generation.  Of course, that's
>> hardly surprising, since there *shouldn't* be any difference.
>
> So why the we bother fixing it? ;-)

The real reason why I noticed:  Someone reported a strange Gnus bug in
dk.edb.system.unix.  When starting Gnus he would get this error:

      "Symbol's value as variable is void: gnus-t"

and nothing more would happen.  I guessed that maybe it could be caused
by a wrong newline in the format specs in .newsrc.eld¹.  But when I
looked in my own .newsrc.eld there were no format specs.

I wasn't really sure whether the manual or the code was wrong about saving
format specs -- I can think of two good reasons for not saving them:

* It doesn't really matter.
* Byte-code isn't portable between Emacs and XEmacs.

So basically I was just wondering if it was a documentation bug or a
code bug.


¹ this was indeed the problem.