Re: 23.0.60; File corruption when Gnus reads .overview

[Stephen Berman]

On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:54:48 +0100 Stephen Berman <address@hidden> wrote:

> Some change between 2008-02-21 and 2008-03-03 has the effect that, when
> Gnus reads an .overview file containing certain non-ascii characters,
> that file immediately gets corrupted.  With my current Emacs build
> (which is really from 2008-03-03; the date of 2008-03-06 given below is
> because I ran `make TAGS' then) I can visit the file outside of Gnus
> without problem, and in my build from 2008-02-21 reading it with Gnus
> also does not cause corruption.  The file in question is my Gnus
> .overview file of the gmane.emacs.help newsgroup.  I have attached an
> exerpt of this file (the whole file is 14 MB large) containing the first
> 1000 entries, which is enough to induce the corruption.  (When Gnus
> reads the whole file, the serious corruption begins at entry 586, but
> when I substituted the attached excerpt, I found the serious corruption
> starting at entry 292.  By "serious" I mean a huge sequence of
> non-printing characters; some earlier entries show brief corrupt
> sequences.)  To reproduce, I copy the attached file as .overview to the
> following location (the News directory is by default in ~, but I keep it
> in ~/.emacs.d): News/agent/nntp/news.gmane.org/gmane/emacs/help.  Then I
> start Gnus with gnus-unplugged (I use the Gnus Agent), go online with `J
> j', and open the gmane.emacs.help group.  At this point the corruption
> is already there, even if I quit the group and Gnus without saving.  I
> don't know enough about Gnus to know whether these instructions plus the
> attached file are enough for others to reproduce the corruption.  If
> more information or additional Gnus files are needed, I will gladly
> provide them.
>
> Steve Berman
>
> In GNU Emacs 23.0.60.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.12.0)
>  of 2008-03-06 on escher

With my current build (GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+
Version 2.12.0) of 2008-03-13 on escher), the file corruption has
disappeared, but Gnus still has a problem with the .overview file: when
I open the gmane.emacs.help group, all my marks are gone except the one
corresponding to the entry in the .overview file that occurs earlier
than the first entry containing the problematic non-ascii characters.
In other words, it appears that Gnus is not processing the .overview
file after it reads the problematic non-ascii characters.  I would be
grateful if a Gnus hacker could look into this, as I cannot usefully
read gmane.emacs.help with Gnus from the current trunk.  (The problem
with the marks was also present in the build for which I posted my OP,
but I refrained from mentioning it because I thought the file corruption
was the real problem.  But now the corruption is gone, but the marks
problem remains.)

Steve Berman