Re: read messages becoming unread in nnml

[Emanuel Berg]

Julien Cubizolles <j.cubizolles@free.fr> writes:

> For years now I've experienced this strange
> behaviour: running gnus-group-get-new-news or
> restarting gnus changes the status of read messages
> in nnml groups: some read messages become unread. It
> doesn't happen in the nntp and nnimap groups I'm
> using.

Yeah, I've experienced things like that many times, I
haven't been able to deduct if it has happened
exclusively for nnml though.

I can't help you any better than offer some thoughts
and observations, that contain a couple of questions as
well. If more knowledgable people will answer those,
perhaps that'll help us both.

I always thought that happened because the .newsrc.eld
file wasn't saved, so sometimes the changes would
vanish when you terminate Emacs. It is just a theory. I
would think it best for the .newsrc.eld be saved every
time there is a change, so that it is always 100%
consistent with what you see and do in Gnus. I have put
the varieties of (gnus-summary-save-newsrc t) here and
there but I haven't covered every scenario. And yes, it
is a bit spooky - to have 100% self-confidence when
working with a computer, you must be 100% confident
that the machine is 100% reliable and deterministic...
It is not often, but sometimes I feel Gnus isn't, and
that sometimes isn't pleasant. But I haven't ruled out
that the error is with me or my
configuration/extension. Only it is very difficult to
reproduce those occasions, so I don't think I'll find
out anytime soon, either.

Anyway, nnml and nntp, what I can see metadata for both
are stored in .newsrc.eld. I have this:

(setq gnus-use-dribble-file nil)
(setq gnus-always-read-dribble-file nil)
(setq gnus-read-newsrc-file nil)
(setq gnus-save-newsrc-file nil)
(setq gnus-startup-file (format "%s.newsrc" gnus-directory))

The last line should tell you where to look
(`describe-variable', if you don't set it explicitly).
Are your changes to nnml reflected in that file? But
this isn't pleasant to debug - too many digits...

For nntp, there is also, for example,
~/News/marks/Aioe.org/gnu/emacs/gnus - that deals with
marks, though what it seems not what has been read and
not read. I wonder though, why this is kept in parallel
with the .newsrc.eld file?

-- 
underground experts united