Weirdness ... virtually lost .newsrc.eld

Weirdness ... virtually lost .newsrc.eld

[Chris Richards]

Howdy.

This evening my wonderful X locked on me.  I had to brutishly kill a
few processes and finally ended up taking down all of X.  In the
process, I sent a SIGHUP to an xemacs session that was running gnus.

After I recovered, I started xemacs and gnus.  I was prompted to
recover the auto-save file.  Sure, why not?

Unfortunately, all of my groups where "0 * * nnfolder:group_name".  When I
tried to select a group, it complained that there was no select method
for that group.  Essentially I was locked out.

First, I copied off the .newsrc.eld file and started from scratch.  I
added all of my groups that I originally had.  They even reported the
correct number of messages.

When I went to select these, it took me in but only showed me one
message.  Weird.

I consulted the .newsrc.eld file and discovered that each of my old-
now-newly added groups where "archive" (the last string in the group
list).  Hrm.  Didn't want to deal with that.  However... why were they
added as archives when I was using them previously as nnfolder?

I copied back the original (defunct) .newsrc.eld.  I noticed that for
the last element of the group list was "nnfolder:".  Okay... sounds
good.

Yet, when I glimpsed the drafts folder entry I noticed the last list
element was (nndraft "").  Interesting.  I changed all of the
"nnfolder:" references to (nnfolder "") and restarted gnus.

Everything _seems_ to work after complaining about a bad .newsrc.eld
file.  One thing that I noticed (which I didn't think existed before)
was now that I have groups nnfolder+archive:group_name.  This at a
cursory glance is 1:1 with my normal groups.  I guess this was a side
effect of "bad" .newsrc.eld?

Anyway, my questions are:

a) Why were the group list elements ending in "nnfolder:"?
b) Should it be (nnfolder "") similar to the nndraft group?
c) What could have caused this problem and what is the _correct_
solution?
d) Why were the groups re-added as archive when I first tried to
reconstruct my setup?

Thanks,
cjr
-- 
A train stops at a train station.  A bus stops at a bus station.  On
my desk I have a workstation...

Re: Weirdness ... virtually lost .newsrc.eld

[Kai Großjohann]

Chris Richards <cjr@netpliance.net> writes:

> a) Why were the group list elements ending in "nnfolder:"?
> b) Should it be (nnfolder "") similar to the nndraft group?

Suppose you have server parameters, like this:

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods
             '(nnfolder "" (some-parameter some-value)))

Suppose that you then change the value.  Then what happens with all
the existing entries in .newsrc.eld which have the old value?

That's why it is better to have "nnfolder:" in there, I think, because
then Gnus will pick up the parameters from
gnus-secondary-select-methods. 

kai
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