Re: Topic display no longer works - problems solved, bug in v5.10.6?

[David Sumbler]

David Sumbler <david@aeolia.co.uk> writes:

> Help!  I can no longer see my carefully structured topics.
>
> I made some alterations to .gnus, and for some reason the next time I
> started Gnus the screen was confused - basically new lines did not
> seem to be appearing where required.
>
> After some more fiddling about (not sure quite what I did) I can no
> longer display topics at all.  When I press 't' in the Group buffer,
> or enable line 3 of .gnus (see below), only a single '[' is displayed,
> then I get the message "Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p, nil".
>
> Presumably there is some corrupted lisp code somewhere.  But I haven't
> managed to find where Gnus stores information such as the topic
> structure.  I tried rebuilding gnus v5.10.6 but it hasn't helped.
>
> My .gnus file (which I'd welcome any comments on) is as follows:
>
> (setq gnus-auto-select-next 'slightly-quietly)
> (setq gnus-group-line-format "%M%S%p%P%5y: %(%G%)%l")
> ;(setq gnus-group-mode-hook '(gnus-topic-mode))
> (setq gnus-message-archive-group '((if (message-mail-p) "misc-mail" 
> "misc-news")))
> (setq gnus-read-active-file 'some)
> (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "usenet.plus.net"))
> (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnfolder "\"\"" (nnfolder-get-new-mail 
> t))))
> (setq mail-sources '((directory :path "/home/david/Mail_folders/" :suffix 
> ".prcml")))
> (setq gnus-summary-mode-line-format "Gnus: %G [%A] %Z")
> (setq gnus-topic-indent-level 4)
> (setq server-kill-new-buffers t)
>
> ;; For HTML rendering:
> (setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m)
> (setq mm-inline-text-html-with-images t)
> (setq mm-inline-text-html-renderer 'mm-inline-text-html-render-with-w3m)

After several hours of experimenting, I solved the problem of the
corrupted topic display.

Having realized that all these settings are kept in .newsrc.eld, I
decided to back it up and then try editing it directly.  I removed all
the old topic stuff, then started Gnus and created my topics tree from
scratch.

Comparing the new version of .newsrc.eld to the backed up version,
there were some odd "nil" items in the older file, which can only have
been put there by Gnus itself.  How or why I don't know, but it would
appear to be a bug if Gnus can corrupt its own files and make them
invalid.

After study various items in .newsrc.eld I took courage and decided to
alter my .gnus file (see above).  Evidently there were errors in the
gnus-group-line-format and gnus-secondary-select-methods lines.
Having corrected the latter (by changing "\"\"" to "") the problem I
reported a week or two back is also solved: new mail is now fetched
when Gnus is started.  Yippee!

When I started to use Gnus I was using the Emacs "customize" option to
change variables, lacking the courage to edit the Lisp directly.  No
doubt this explains why all the settings were in my .emacs file.  As
you can see, I have now extracted them to a .gnus file.

Thanks to those who have helped me along my learning curve.  I'll be
back with a couple more queries in a day or two!

David

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