Re: difference btw .emacs vs .gnus?

[maierh@myself.com]

Patrick Drechsler <patrick.drechsler@gmx.net> writes:

> My question concerning GNUS is: If I choose the way of
> customizing via 'M-x customize-variable <RET> whatever <RET> I end up
> with all my customizations in my ~/.emacs and not in ~/.gnus. Why
> doesn't the customization routine (which I prefere using as newbie)
> automatically write things like the following stuff:
>
>  '(gnus-check-new-newsgroups nil)
>  '(gnus-default-posting-charset (quote iso-8859-15))
>  '(gnus-keep-backlog 100)
>  '(gnus-secondary-select-methods (quote ((nnml ""))))
>  '(gnus-select-method (quote (nntp "news.t-online.de")))
>  '(mail-sources (quote ((file :path "/var/spool/mail/patrick"))))
>
> into ~/.gnus? Should I have created that directory in advance?  As far
> is I have perceived the (very amusing, but still complicated for me)
> documentation it doesn't make a difference if emacs reads just the
> ~/.emacs and then ~/.gnus, but I would like to have different
> configuration files for different purposes. Up to now my main concern
> was devoted to finishing my thesis using LaTeX/emacs...
>
> It comes down to this:
>
> How do I set up my ~/.emacs correctly to include ~/.gnus and all other
> "options" (maybe something like latexuser.el, which include my LaTeX
> preferences) correctly? And is it ok to just cut&past the above
> customization out of ~/.emacs into ~/.gnus?

I don't understand exactly your question but you have the freedom to
specify a custom-file so you don't clutter your .emacs and .gnus
files. gnus reads the ~/.gnus file. And emacs reads as startup file
the ~/.emacs file. So I would put only gnus stuff into the ~/.gnus
file. All the other stuff should be included in the ~/.emacs
file. Here an example to specify a separate custom file.

--- .emacs ---
(setq custom-file "~/build/cvs/test/custom.el")
(if (file-exists-p custom-file)
    (load-file custom-file))