Re: Gnus and rsync

[Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com>]

nunojsilva@invalid.invalid (Nuno J. Silva) writes:

> Eric S Fraga <ucecesf@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> nunojsilva@invalid.invalid (Nuno J. Silva) writes:
>>
>>> So I've now hit the issue where I have two computers on which I want to
>>> keep gnus stuff on-sync.
>>>
>>> I've tried the simple solution: rsyncing the whole bunch of files (news,
>>> mail, .gnus.el, and some other gnus files.
>>
>> maybe have a look at unison?  works very well for keeping systems in
>> sync.
>
> I will, but AFAICT, from the debugging I made today, the issue is not
> rsync, so I'll delay looking unison for a while.
>
>>> Unfortunately, this doesn't work as expected: in some mail folders the
>>> unread messages are months old,[...] 
>
> As promised, I tested diffing the rsync files with a plain tarball sync,
> and it's the same.
>
> What happens is that, after starting gnus, a lot of NOV files get
> changed.
>
> Removing every nov folder (*/.nnmaildir/nov, relative to nnmaildir root)
> before starting gnus forces gnus to regenerate these, what causes a
> slightly long delay but works (that is, now the unread messages are the
> same as in the original gnus setup).
>
> Next step seems to be understanding which changes are made to NOV files
> so I can know why is this happening...
>
> (Same Gnus and Emacs version on both computers.)

I tried a plain old sync for a while with gnus and  more often that not
things went wrong.

The best way I found is to use offlineimap to sync a local dovecot
server. Since gnus uses the server flags all is dandy.