Basic gnus stuff

Basic gnus stuff

[Fredrik Tolf]

Being a long time emacs user, I decided to try out gnus (to read
gmane), which is what I'm doing right now, but I've run into some
problems that I cannot imagine are anything but laughable. I'm ready
to be called stupid.

First of all, how is one _supposed_ to find existing groups to which
one can subscribe? I managed to, but I cannot imagine that it's
supposed to be right. I had to set the `gnus-read-active-file' to `t'
(rather than `some') to get gnus to fetch the group list at all (while
watching the NNTP traffic in Ethereal to even know what gnus was
doing). Surely, this must be too basic an operation to have to change
variable defaults to do? Or is gmane, by any chance, not fully
compatible with gnus?

Then, when I've subscribed to a new group, such as
gmane.linux.gentoo.user, I see a new article count of 182770, and when
I try to select the group, gmane asks how many articles I want to
fetch, defaulting to 182770, which I figure is going to take about to
the heat-death of the universe to execute. Of course, I can select a
much lesser number manually, but it still re-asks me every subsequent
time as well. How do I mark all articles as read and wait for new
articles to arrive? (Or am I thinking about this completely the wrong
way around, somehow?)

Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /., but it complains about
not finding w3. Which seems agreeable, seeing how w3 is not installed
on my system (but isn't it supposed to be installed with emacs?). So I
go about doing that, but it doesn't seem to exist. I download the
source, but upon trying to configure it, it complains about some URL
functions in emacs being missing. What's up? Has w3, and by extension
nnslashdot, been deprecated?  Btw., I use GNU Emacs 21.4.1.

I think I've been trying to RTFM, but I think I must have failed doing
that somehow, since I'm having a hard time believing that these issues
wouldn't be in TFM. Then again, I might be thinking about all this
completely wrong, somehow.

Thanks for any help!

Fredrik Tolf

Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Reiner Steib]

On Wed, May 09 2007, Fredrik Tolf wrote:

> Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /.

You should upgrade Gnus.  nnslashdot needs to be quite recent to parse
the changing html.

I'd suggest to use upgrade to Emacs 22 (pretest) (this includes the
most recent nnslashdot.el) or update to Gnus 5.10.8 (might not be the
most recent).

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Joel Reicher]

Fredrik Tolf <fredrik@dolda2000.com> writes:

> First of all, how is one _supposed_ to find existing groups to which
> one can subscribe? I managed to, but I cannot imagine that it's
> supposed to be right. I had to set the `gnus-read-active-file' to `t'
> (rather than `some') to get gnus to fetch the group list at all (while
> watching the NNTP traffic in Ethereal to even know what gnus was
> doing). Surely, this must be too basic an operation to have to change
> variable defaults to do? Or is gmane, by any chance, not fully
> compatible with gnus?

You might be mistaking a usenet issue for a gnus issue.

Usenet, in general, has no wonderful way of discovering what groups
exist. Either you know the name of the group already, in which case in
gnus you can "jump" (key is 'j') directly to it, or you don't know the
name of the group in which case you must perform some kind of search
on the entire active file.

In gnus there are two ways to get the active file. One is the
keystroke 'A A' in the group buffer, the other is to go to the server
buffer and then to "browse" a server.

> Then, when I've subscribed to a new group, such as
> gmane.linux.gentoo.user, I see a new article count of 182770, and when
> I try to select the group, gmane asks how many articles I want to
> fetch, defaulting to 182770, which I figure is going to take about to
> the heat-death of the universe to execute. Of course, I can select a
> much lesser number manually, but it still re-asks me every subsequent
> time as well. How do I mark all articles as read and wait for new
> articles to arrive?

Please read

http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_16.html#SEC16

and in particular

http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_24.html#SEC24

or the equivalent info pages in emacs.

> Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /., but it complains about
> not finding w3. Which seems agreeable, seeing how w3 is not installed
> on my system (but isn't it supposed to be installed with emacs?). So I
> go about doing that, but it doesn't seem to exist. I download the
> source, but upon trying to configure it, it complains about some URL
> functions in emacs being missing. What's up? Has w3, and by extension
> nnslashdot, been deprecated?  Btw., I use GNU Emacs 21.4.1.

Sorry, can't help you. I can only say that w3 does not come with
emacs, and it's quite separate to gnus too.

Cheers,

        - Joel

Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Kamen TOMOV]

On сряда, Май 09 2007, Joel Reicher wrote:

> Fredrik Tolf <fredrik@dolda2000.com> writes:
>
>> Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /., but it complains about
>> not finding w3. Which seems agreeable, seeing how w3 is not
>> installed on my system (but isn't it supposed to be installed with
>> emacs?). So I go about doing that, but it doesn't seem to exist. I
>> download the source, but upon trying to configure it, it complains
>> about some URL functions in emacs being missing. What's up? Has w3,
>> and by extension nnslashdot, been deprecated?  Btw., I use GNU
>> Emacs 21.4.1.

w3 seems to be out of fashion, w3m is what most people use. If you
still need to use w3 you could make do without compiling it doing the
following:

(setq load-path (cons "C:/<path to w3>/lisp" load-path))
(require 'w3-auto)

HTH,


-- 
Камен

Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Sebastian Tennant]

Quoth Joel Reicher <joel@panacea.null.org>:
> Fredrik Tolf <fredrik@dolda2000.com> writes:
>
>> First of all, how is one _supposed_ to find existing groups to which
>> one can subscribe? I managed to, but I cannot imagine that it's
>> supposed to be right. I had to set the `gnus-read-active-file' to `t'
>> (rather than `some') to get gnus to fetch the group list at all (while
>> watching the NNTP traffic in Ethereal to even know what gnus was
>> doing). Surely, this must be too basic an operation to have to change
>> variable defaults to do? Or is gmane, by any chance, not fully
>> compatible with gnus?
>
> You might be mistaking a usenet issue for a gnus issue.
>
> Usenet, in general, has no wonderful way of discovering what groups
> exist. Either you know the name of the group already, in which case in
> gnus you can "jump" (key is 'j') directly to it, or you don't know the
> name of the group in which case you must perform some kind of search
> on the entire active file.
>
> In gnus there are two ways to get the active file. One is the
> keystroke 'A A' in the group buffer, the other is to go to the server
> buffer and then to "browse" a server.

Go to the *Server* buffer by typing '^' in the *Group* buffer.  Once
there subscribe to groups with 'u', and then 'q' for quit.  ('C-h m'
to see what else you can do).

>> Then, when I've subscribed to a new group, such as
>> gmane.linux.gentoo.user, I see a new article count of 182770, and
>> when I try to select the group, gmane asks how many articles I want
>> to fetch, defaulting to 182770, which I figure is going to take
>> about to the heat-death of the universe to execute. Of course, I
>> can select a much lesser number manually, but it still re-asks me
>> every subsequent time as well. How do I mark all articles as read
>> and wait for new articles to arrive?

'c' in the *Group* buffer will 'catch-up' a group.

> Please read
>
> http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_16.html#SEC16
>
> and in particular
>
> http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_24.html#SEC24
>
> or the equivalent info pages in emacs.
>
>> Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /., but it complains about
>> not finding w3. Which seems agreeable, seeing how w3 is not installed
>> on my system (but isn't it supposed to be installed with emacs?). So I
>> go about doing that, but it doesn't seem to exist. I download the
>> source, but upon trying to configure it, it complains about some URL
>> functions in emacs being missing. What's up? Has w3, and by extension
>> nnslashdot, been deprecated?  Btw., I use GNU Emacs 21.4.1.
>
> Sorry, can't help you. I can only say that w3 does not come with
> emacs, and it's quite separate to gnus too.
> Cheers,
>
>         - Joel

w3 isn't much good.  w3m is a much better pager that works with emacs
but needs to be installed separately, along with w3m-el (the emacs
interface to w3m).

Good luck.  Gnus does have a tendency to make your head swim for the
first couple of years :-)

Sebastian

Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Adam Sjøgren]

On 09 May 2007 05:31:25 +0200, Fredrik wrote:

> First of all, how is one _supposed_ to find existing groups to which
> one can subscribe?

>From the *Group* buffer, I usually press ^ to get to the *Server*
buffer, then hit RET on the server I want look at, and then use u to
toggle subscribe/unsubscribe on the groups shown.

> How do I mark all articles as read and wait for new articles to
> arrive?

You need to "catch up" on the group, which is bound to c. That makes
Gnus record all unread articles as read, so only new ones will show up
as unread.


Regarding your w3-problem I suggest you either submit some more details
about your system (I use Debian GNU/Linux and use w3m - by installing
the package w3m-el¹) or find a group where the w3-developers hang out.


  Welcome to Gnus,

    Adam


¹ Configured in my ~/.gnus like this (which may or may not be outdated):

 ; Show HTML with w3m:
 (setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m)

 ; Follow links in w3m with browse-url:
 (add-hook 'gnus-article-mode-hook
           (lambda ()
             (set (make-local-variable 'w3m-goto-article-function)
                  'browse-url)))

-- 
 "Danskar sover ofantligt länge."                             Adam Sjøgren
 "Skriv det."                                            asjo@koldfront.dk