Can I specify location of .newsrc.eld and alike or gnus & Dropbox

Can I specify location of .newsrc.eld and alike or gnus & Dropbox

[Mikhail Titov]

Hello!

I'm trying to set up gnus such that I can keep track of news from 2
machines without reading same news twice. I thought I could get away by
using symlinks or even hard links. But it looks like gnus writes into a
new file as inode is different. I thought gnus-home-directory affects
location of .newsrc.eld  but it looks like it does not.

So what is the best way to sync configuration between 2 machines?

I'm running Emacs 24.1.50.1 (Ubuntu & Windows) with default (?) Gnus 5.13 .

-- 
Mikhail

Re: Can I specify location of .newsrc.eld and alike or gnus & Dropbox

[William Gardella]

Mikhail Titov <mlt-0UDz38MK/Mo@public.gmane.org> writes:

> Hello!
>
> I'm trying to set up gnus such that I can keep track of news from 2
> machines without reading same news twice. I thought I could get away by
> using symlinks or even hard links. But it looks like gnus writes into a
> new file as inode is different. I thought gnus-home-directory affects
> location of .newsrc.eld  but it looks like it does not.
>
> So what is the best way to sync configuration between 2 machines?
>
> I'm running Emacs 24.1.50.1 (Ubuntu & Windows) with default (?) Gnus 5.13 .

Hi!

`gnus-home-directory' is the correct variable to customize, but it must
already be set before Gnus is initialized; otherwise, Gnus will
regenerate ~/.newsrc.eld on restart if it can't find it (which is
annoying, because you're trying to get it to show up inside your version
control repo/dropbox/whatever).

Best,
WGG

-- 
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Re: Can I specify location of .newsrc.eld and alike or gnus & Dropbox

[Mikhail Titov]

William Gardella <gardellawg-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
writes:

>> So what is the best way to sync configuration between 2 machines?
>
> `gnus-home-directory' is the correct variable to customize, but it
> must already be set before Gnus is initialized;

Indeed, I thought that quitting Gnus was enough. It looks like it is
working after restarting Emacs.

> otherwise, Gnus will regenerate ~/.newsrc.eld on restart if it can't
> find it (which is annoying, because you're trying to get it to show up
> inside your version control repo/dropbox/whatever).

Still weird it does not reuse existing file, but creates new one.

-- 
Mikhail

Re: Can I specify location of .newsrc.eld and alike or gnus & Dropbox

[William Gardella]

> Still weird it does not reuse existing file, but creates new one.

Yeah, I'm surprised as well that it wants to make a new inode instead of
using the symlink.  Looking at (I think) the relevant function,
`gnus-read-newsrc-el-file' in gnus-start.el, I see no obvious reason why
it should behave that way.  The important part of the function uses the
Emacs builtin test `file-exists-p' which can usually handle symlinks,
networked filesystems, Tramp filenames, etc. without unexpected
behavior.  No idea why you were seeing what you were seeing :)

-- 
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