Re: Sharing Gnus on several machines

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:03:33 +0000 (UTC), Florent Georges <lists@fgeorges.org> 
wrote:
>   Hi,
>
> I use several machine every days, and I wonder whether it is possible
> to share Gnus configuration between them.  In particular, which
> messages have been read.
>
> Sharing the ~/.gnus config is easy, but when I leave the machine A,
> then log on machine B, I would like to not see the messages I've read
> on machine A.  If needed, I can save some files from A to a server
> when I leave Gnus, then update them on B before launching Gnus again.
>
> Is there a solution?  Did I miss something in the manual?

If the two machines can access the same IMAP server, the easiest method
by far is to configure Gnus on both machines with a select-method that
points them to the same IMAP server.  Then as you update article state
from one system the other Gnus instance can refresh its marks and other
article-related information from the IMAP server.

Synchronizing Gnus instances in machines that cannot access the same
IMAP server is possible too, but you would have to be extra careful to
synchronize only in *one* direction.  Otherwise it's possible to:

  * Read some articles in machine A.
  * Post some messages from machine A.
  * Synchronize machine A _from_ machine B.

At this point some of the things that happened got lost (e.g. article
marks for what you read in A are gone, or archived copies of sent
messages were deleted from A's News/ directory).

Having said that, if you the file-synchronization route, it should be
possible to mirror the following files to keep two Gnus instances in
sync with each other:

    ~/.newsrc                   - if you have one
    ~/.newsrc.eld
    ~/News/

If you are using Gnus to read email too, add ~/Mail/ to this list, for
any local mail backend files.