Gnus+nnml dependent on active file?

Gnus+nnml dependent on active file?

[Jan Rychter]

I was bitten by this several times: why does Gnus (or rather the nnml
backend in particular) depend so much on the ~/Mail/active file?

Whenever the filesystem fills up, Gnus is unable to save this file, so
it gets truncated to 0 length. Then, even though Gnus has all the
information in memory (or so I think), it won't try to write the file
again. One then has to recreate it painfully with
nnml-generate-nov-databases...

Doesn't the .newsrc.eld file contain all the necessary information?

If it doesn't, could we please have a function that would write out the
~/Mail/active from memory upon request? Is that possible at all?

--J.

Re: Gnus+nnml dependent on active file?

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Jan Rychter <jwr@icm.edu.pl> writes:
> I was bitten by this several times: why does Gnus (or rather the nnml
> backend in particular) depend so much on the ~/Mail/active file?
> Whenever the filesystem fills up, Gnus is unable to save this file,
> it gets truncated to 0 length...
...
> Doesn't the .newsrc.eld file contain all the necessary information?

No.  .newsrc.eld contains information about what articles you have
read.  The active file contains information about what articles exist,
read or not.

The short answer is, of course, not to let your filesystem fill up.
Otherwise, it would be nice if the emacs environment provided some
means by which to check filesystem status before trying to write a
file.

I don't believe Gnus even maintains the information about the active
file on an ongoing basis -- Gnus re-reads active whenever Gnus is
processing new incoming mail or expiring messages.  So asking for a
general "write out the active file on demand" function isn't possible,
either.