Re: What's a killed article ?

[Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com>]

harven <harven@free.fr> writes:

[...]

> - GNUS-SECONDARY-SELECT-METHODS
>   and gnus-select-method. A single select method but many secondary
>   methods ? Why  differentiate ? Is it correct to put a mail group
>   as the primary method ?

I definitely agree.

And the sad thing is that this part is almost the first thing the user
is going to read when using gnus for the first time and is confusing.

In my understanding (mostly based on experiments) groups which belongs
to the primary server (the one given by gnu-select-method) can be
retrieved from another news server later. You just need to change the
server from gnus-select-method or by starting gnus with 'C-u M-x
gnus' (which is a bad idea actually, see later). IOW these groups
aren't stick to one server.

In contrary groups which belong to secondary servers (given by
gnus-secondary-select-methods) include the server name in their
names. So they can not be opened from different servers later.

This difference seems really useless: it gave me totaly disaster
results when I tried to swithc the primary server with 'C-u M-x gnus'
and get back to my initial server: all articles were marked as
unread. Even worse I set (display . all) on all these groups but gnus
seems to ignore it now...

Whereas the gnus doc, it says:

,----
|    A slightly different approach to foreign groups is to set the
| `gnus-secondary-select-methods' variable.  The select methods listed in
| this variable are in many ways just as native as the
| `gnus-select-method' server.  They will also be queried for active
`----

note the "in may ways just as native as the...", which sounds totaly
useless since we still don't know what the differences are.

Of course all of this is from a gnus dumb user...
-- 
Francis