Re: which gnus files used to hold gnus state? (for manual)

[Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com>]

kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> John Owens <jowens@ece.ucdavis.edu> writes:
>
>> I'd like to get a list of the files used to hold gnus state. This is
>> for potential inclusion in the manual (after discussion with Lars)
>> and would be important for users who are interested in synching the
>> gnus state of two machines (say, a laptop and a desktop).
>

snip...

>
> Now, for the agent.  There is a subdir ~/News/agent/lib which
> contains the categories and the servers files.  Further subdirs are
> for servers/groups.  (Presumably the exact directory layout depends
> on some *-use-long-file-name(s) variable.)  A directory for a server
> contains a subdir agent.lib with the file agent.lib/active.  All
> other subdirs are groups (in foo.bar or foo/bar format).  Each group
> contains a file .agentview and a file .overview and the messages.
>
> What does .agentview contain? --> Anyone?

The .agentview contains per-article timestamps that are used by the
agent's expiration mechanism.

The .overview file contains the article headers.

>> The overall goal would be to know exactly what files to sync if I want
>> to mirror my gnus setup on computer B from computer A. Hopefully in
>> the next generation of gnus there will be a list of state-containing
>> files and an automated way to sync them (gnus-sync-state-files with a
>> configurable sync command like "rsync -e ssh ..."). This could be
>> useful for users who use a laptop and want to sync before going on
>> the road.
>
> Nifty.
>

snip ...

> So, it boils down to this: if you transfer .newsrc.eld, you got to
> transfer the whole hog.  If you abstain from .newsrc.eld, then you
> can do the some-groups trick alluded to for nnml and nnfolder (and
> probably nnmaildir).

But your seen marks are in .newsrc.eld.  If you don't include it, how
will you know which articles have been read?

> Stuff from cache and agent aren't mentioned in .newsrc.eld, so there
> is no problem.

There's no problem so long as the two machines are sharing the same
servers.  The article files in both the agent and the cache are named
after the article number.  You'll get garbage if you try to use these
files with any server except the one from which they were fetched (I
realize that this isn't what you proposed.  I just want to make sure
that anyone reading this understands).

> Above, when I say .newsrc.eld, I always also mean .newsrc.

Kevin