Re: automatic Agentizing of servers (was: Summary buffer

[Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com wrote:
>
>> The highlighting should only occur if you have both enabled the
>> agent (now the default) AND agentized the servers.  If you are
>> truely using the latest version of gnus from CVS, you may have been
>> effected by the latest bug fix.  The agent had a bug whereby editing
>> a method's configuration could result in it being unagentized.
>> That's because the agent was failing to find an exact match when it
>> compared the old and new methods.  It gets to be a rather long story
>> but the patch prevents, and corrects, this sort of problem.  So, if
>> the old gnus unagentized some of your servers then the new gnus
>> could have reversed that error to make then agentized again.
>
> I have the agent enabled (gnus-agent is t).  No servers were agentized
> when I quit Gnus.  My nnimap server was agentized when I started Gnus.
> I would like to keep gnus-agent t, without automatic agentizing of any
> of my servers.  I have not edited any server method configurations.
>
> I use the latest CVS, updated nightly, and I made sure I was up to
> date before restarting Gnus.

I've traced this behavior to the gnus-agent-auto-agentize-methods
variable.  If you don't agentize ANY server, the methods named in this
variable (currently nntp and nnimap) will be agentized by gnus when
you start up.  Perhaps we can make this customizable or only apply it
when the agent is being used for the first time (for example, when
agent/lib/servers doesn't exist).  I'd rather defer this to the
original author since I'm not aware of the requirements behind adding it.

>> BTW, the nnimap developers turned the agent on to provide
>> client-side caching.  Rather than turning that off, you might want
>> to consider turning off the undownloaded faces.  You can do that by
>> locally editing the faces (gnus-summary-*-undownloaded-face) to
>> mimic the normal faces or setting the
>> agent-disable-undownloaded-faces parameter (See the manual for all
>> of the locations where agent parameters can be set).
>
> As far as the faces go, that's great.  My problem is that I can't use
> the agent because my disk quota is very low.  Also, when quitting a
> summary buffer the Agent's checks are slow (10x slower than without
> the Agent) but that's not the main problem.

The disk quote I can understand.  I'm not sure about the agent checks.
Right now, I don't remember the agent doing anything when quitting a
summary buffer.

>> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>>> To Agent developers: maybe I'm missing something, but if I
>>> explicitly remove a server from the Agent (which I've done for my
>>> nnimap server before and I also did yesterday) should that server
>>> be agentized again when I start Gnus?  That's what happened this
>>> morning.
>> 
>> No, that shouldn't happen.  The latest patch changing the agent
>> occurred on 20 Nov 2003.  Have you updated from CVS since then?  Can
>> you check the contents of agent/lib/servers?  Does it appear to be
>> list of methods or is it a list of server names?
>
> ~/News/agent/lib/servers contains the string "nil".  Still, my nnimap
> server was agentized when I restarted Gnus just now.  By restart, I
> mean a full Emacs exit and start again.  I'm using the CVS Emacs.

See comments above concerning gnus-agent-auto-agentize-methods.

Kevin