Re: nnimap/nnagent troubles

[Christoph Rohland <cr@sap.com>]

Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> writes:

> Christoph Rohland <cr@sap.com> writes:
> >    I tried to use ssl as connection type, but somehow my
> >    laptop did not use it despite the fact that I did set the
> >    parameter in gnus-secondary-select-methods. 
> 
> Ah yes, the curse of changing select method without removing
> references to the old server.

Yes, I did change nnimap from primary select method to secondary
some time before...

> Since Gnus store the full server in various places (in every group
> info, in agent etc) you need to unsubscribe groups, unregister the
> server from the agent and THEN change server method in your .gnus. If
> this isn't done, there will be inconsistent server specifications in
> various parts of Gnus causing all sorts of strange problems.

But I think here lies the culprit. gnus stores many information
redundant and also mixes very different kinds of them up.

It should really follow its own data structure for configuration by
having one point to store the server information and another for group
information which only should reference the server by name. (see the
agent issue) and it really should not mix the more transient status
information (~.newsrc) with the configuration.

Actually I would think of something like:

1) .newsrc(.eld) stores status information for the articles.
2) We have a server config file which stores all the server info. The
   agent should also use this.
3) We have group config files: To which server does it belong (and
   only one reference). To which agent category does it belong? We
   could extend this to a directory and directly store the relevant
   files like overview and cache/agent files here. (BTW cache and
   agent [c|sh]ould be one thing.) Probably the score file could be
   here also.

        Christoph