Re: Unnecessary nntp reading?

[John Griffith <griffith@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de>]

>> "LMI" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

LMI> The activation level is orthogonal to the issue of reading the active
LMI> file. 

OK.  What does "activation level" mean?  What does it do that
subscribedness levels don't do?  Does it just control which lines in
the group buffer get updated?

I haven't tried this, but does it mean that if my activation level say
2 and I have nntp groups on level 3 and gnus-read-active-file is
`some' (and level 3 is a subscribed level - or even an unsubscribed
level) then all the active file information will be retrieved but it
just won't be shown?

If so, then what is the purpose of activation level?  If I don't want
to see the level 3 groups I can just look at the level 2 and below
groups.

[Guessing wildly] Or does activation level just prevent foreign groups
from being read?  This I guess would be an advantage - if I have
foreign nntp groups on level 5 I may not want their servers to be read
but I may still want to read all of the groups on my primary server.

In any case, I think the documentation for gnus-activate-level (and
perhaps gnus-read-active-file) should explain better what it does.
And/or define activation level in the terminology section.