Re: yet more Gnus questions & problems

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

jbw@cs.bu.edu (Joe Wells) writes:

> 1. In the group buffer, what can be supplied as the ADDRESS argument of
>    "G m"?  An example would be helpful.

It depends on what backend the address is for.  If it's nntp,
"news.uio.no" is a likely address.  If it's nndir
"/ftp@ftp.ifi.uio.no:/pub/emacs/gnus/ding/" is an example.  For
backends like nnml which uses the address for naming purposes only,
"private" or "my-mail" can be used.

> 2. Can Gnus be made to work with a compressed mail folder via nnfolder?  I
>    have a bunch of old mail archives that I would like to keep compressed
>    at all times, but also access via Gnus.

It's a tricky question, believe it or not.  If you have a folder
called "things.like.tex", you obviously don't want to open it in LaTeX
mode.  On the other hand, if you have a folder called "things.gz", you
do want it to be uncompressed, quite likely.  Breakage (on files that
happen to end with ".tex", ".c") is much worse than missing features,
so Gnus (and its backends) regards all files as simple modeless text
files.

There should be a separation in Emacs handling of these issues.  ".gz"
handling is something quite different than ".tex" handling, so there
shoul be a way to suppress the latter while keeping the first.

> 3. Where (in what file) do I set the newgroup description for an nndir
>    group?  For example, the group
>    
>      nndir+/ftp@ftp.hpc.uh.edu:/pub/emacs/ding-list-recent/:ding.recent
> 
>    which I use to read this mailing list.

nndir doesn't really support descriptions very well.

> 4. This is a question about the representation of newsgroup information in
>    memory.  Are all marks (tick, dormant, reply, expirable, etc.) kept as
>    uncompressed lists in gnus-newsrc-alist? 

They're kept as (compressed) ranges in Gnus 5.2.

>    I want to write some code that manipulates these items and I need to
>    know:
> 
>      a. What assumptions, if any, can I make about the data format of
>         marks?  Can I assume the mark lists are always ordered with no
>         duplicates?

`(gnus-info-marks (gnus-get-info "group"))' will return the marks
alist for "group".  Each element in this alist looks like:

(tick (1 . 3) 5 9 (14 . 16))

So it's a range with the mark type consed on.

>      c. Is is required and/or guaranteed that the ticked and/or dormant
>         mark lists do not overlap with the list of read articles?  Are any
>         of these sets guaranteed to be non-overlapping?

This has changed between Gnus 5.1 and Gnus 5.2.  In Gnus 5.1 they were
non-overlapping, which lead to a *lot* of extra work.  In Gnus 5.2
they are just simple marks lists like any other marks -- totally
independent of whether the articles are marked as read or not.  (A
ticked article is normally marked as read in the info, though.)

> 1. "M-g" doesn't work inside a digest group.

What's it supposed to do?  nndoc groups aren't supposed to change...

> 2. In group buffer, "j foo RET" does not perform completion on "foo".
>    Instead it just errors.

`TAB' for completion.  I don't think this is an error.

> 3. In summary buffer, if one #-marks part 1 of 2 of a uuencoded thingy,
>    then "X u" doesn't fetch both parts.  It seems like it should.

No -- when you process-mark an article, `X u' should just fetch that
article.  If you want to fetch a series, don't use `#' first -- just
use `X u' on one of the articles in the series.

> 4. In summary buffer, marking multiple articles with # and then doing "X v
>    u" seems to decode all of them before starting the viewer for any of
>    them.

Yup.  See `gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions' if you want to change that.

> 5. In group buffer, "A k" does not display killed mail groups.  It only
>    shows killed groups from the default nntp server.

Yup.  Foreign groups aren't kept in the killed list.  It's a feature.
:-)  No, really.

> 6. Using nnml, the ~/Mail/newsgroups file needs every line prefixed with
>    "nnml:" in order for Gnus to find a mail group's description.  This
>    seems logically wrong since inside the backend newsgroups should not
>    have the prefix.

Yup.  Fix in Gnus v5.2.18.

> 7. In group buffer, "C-u C-c C-d" has the side effect of wiping out all
>    descriptions for newsgroups from every other server.

Ditto.

-- 
  "Yes.  The journey through the human heart 
     would have to wait until some other time."