Re: 2 things

[jdc@chow.mat.jhu.edu (Dan Christensen)]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:
> jdc@chow.mat.jhu.edu (Dan Christensen) writes:
> 
> > Ahh, I see.  It seems to me that it would be better have
> > `gnus-no-server' behave exactly like `gnus' except that the server is
> > not contacted.  The start-up level is an orthogonal issue, and one can
> > always do `C-u 2 gnus-no-server' if one wants.
> 
> If you intend to change the meaning of `gnus-no-server', you have to
> provide an alternative functionality for `M-x gnus-no-server' used to
> do.

If `gnus-no-server' is changed so that by default it doesn't set
the startup level to 2, then to get the old functionality you
just do `C-u 2 gnus-no-server'.  Like I said above.  Or am I
misunderstanding you?

My point is that there is already a mechanism for setting the startup
level, namely by giving a numeric prefix, and this works whether one
uses `gnus' or `gnus-no-server'.  The way things are now, it isn't
possible to use gnus without a server and without the startup level
set to something.  This makes gnus-no-server very slow in various
circumstances, just as `C-u 2 gnus' can be much slower than `gnus'
if you have a lots of groups on levels 1 and 2.

Anyways, I don't really care what gnus-no-server does.  But I do want
a fast way to access mail only.  Here are some timings that I did
about a month ago.

         M-x gnus		6 sec.
   C-u 2 M-x gnus	        10 sec.
         M-x gnus-no-server	3 min 0 sec. 
   C-u 2 M-x gnus-no-server	12 sec.

I use nnfolder and keep my important mail groups at levels 1 and 2.  I
keep my archive groups at level 3.  And I keep my nntp groups at level
4.  `gnus-no-server' starts up at level 3 because I've set
gnus-level-default-subscribed to 4.  I have gnus-read-active-file set
to 'some, and I have deleted all of my killed newsgroups from my
.newsrc.eld.  These timings don't include load time and were done
before I started compressing nnfolder files.  (I would guess that the
third line would be 5 or 10 times slower now, while the others would
stay the same.)

It's the third line that I'm complaining about --- it should be faster
than the first line since it has less work to do.  There should be
some way that I can read all of my mail folders without accessing the
news server and without spending 3 (or now 30) minutes during startup.
If I have to type something other than `gnus-no-server', e.g. (gnus
nil t), that's fine.

Dan

-- 
Dan Christensen
jdc@math.jhu.edu