Re: Mail source unreachable - continue yes/no?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> In the meantime I got a backtrace on my stop-the-world nntp connection
>> error, which I've posted below. I guess there's nothing mysterious about
>> it -- the process dies (I can't tell if it's actually the timeout doing
>> it or not), and nntp-accept-process-output/nntp-report ends up raising
>> the error, and there's nothing up the line to catch it. Does this look
>> surprising or wrong for any reason?
>>
>>   (if nntp--report-1 (progn (if nntp-record-commands (progn
>> (nntp-record-command "*** CONNECTION LOST ***"))) (throw
>
> Network errors are common, so it shouldn't be throwing an error in the
> first place.
>
> But I can't recall ever seeing the `nntp-report' function before, so who
> knows what the logic is.  :-/  That looks like a...  debugging function?

The function has existed and raised an error since the "dawn of time"
(since CVS days), I guess I'm surprised this hasn't annoyed anyone else.
Basically it shadows `nnheader-report', and gives the server a single
chance to reconnect in case of failure -- the "nntp-with-open-group"
mechanism -- before failing altogether. All that's fine, I wish nnimap
had something similar, but raising the error seems wrong.

In fact raising the error would be the right thing in the code sketch I
posted above! This code is ahead of its time.

Anyway, simply removing the call to error should do the trick. That
will leave `nnheader-report' as the final form, which returns nil.
`nntp-report' is the final form everywhere it's called, so the nil goes
up to callers, which will (mostly) interpret that as failure.

Eric