Re: Hanging gnus session

[Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org>]

Haines Brown <haines@engels.histomat.net> writes:

Hi Haines,

> Here is my setup. In .fluxbox I have a key defined that starts an
> "emacs-gnus" executable script. That script simply has:
>
>      #!/bin/sh
>      emacs -q -l /home/haines/.emacs.d/elisp/gnus.el
>      exit 0
>
> The gnus.el file defines the news servers and some other parameters
> which have never been a problem. As its final line I have:
>
>       (gnus)
>
> When I hit the key, gnus starts OK, and it checks new news. However,
> there are two problems.
>
> First, when gnus starts, the emacs minibuffer says, "Gnus auto-save
> file exists. Do you want to read it?" If I respond "y", messages are
> retrieved. I don't know why gnus needs to access an auto-save file and I
> would like to avoid the query under normal conditions.

Gnus regularly auto-saves what articles you've read etc, and when you
hit `s' in *Group* or quit Gnus it saves that information to
~/.newsrc.eld and deletes the auto-saved file.  So when it asks you that
question on startup, it means that you've not properly quit your
previous Gnus session.  Maybe you simply killed emacs without quitting
Gnus before?  Or maybe there's another Emacs session running Gnus
already?

> Second, when I do "g" to update the groups, gnus simply hangs. $ ps aux
> tells me there are two processes running:
>
>     /bin/sh /home/haines/scripts/emacs-gnus
>     emacs -q -l /home/haines/.emacs.d/elisp/gnus.el
>
> I have to kill them and start gnus anew in order to read news again. I
> would prefer that the emacs client run gnus all the time and I only need
> to press g to update it.

That's how it's supposed to work.  Does the echo area indicate what
server it checks when it hangs?

What you can also do is `M-x toggle-debug-on-quit RET' before you update
with `g'.  Then, when Gnus hangs for a while hit `C-g'.  That will show
you a backtrace which you can post here.

Bye,
Tassilo