Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnewsh!ho5cad!msb From: msb@ho5cad.ATT.COM (Mike Balenger) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.gnus Subject: Re: gnus bug? Message-ID: Date: 11 Dec 89 10:18:44 GMT References: Sender: msb@cbnewsh.ATT.COM Reply-To: msb@ho5cad.ATT.COM (Mike Balenger) Distribution: gnu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 70 In-reply-to: glass@acsdev.acsdev.uucp's message of 6 Dec 89 12:43:15 GMT In article glass@acsdev.acsdev.uucp (Adam Glass) writes: > Behavior: some newsgroups seem to go bad. Gnus says there are messages in > the group. The message is actually there too. When you hit '=' to get a > list of messages or just try to read the first one you get the following > message in the minibuffer: > Retrieving Newsgroup: comp.compilers > Symbol's Value as variable is void: From: [ bad article deleted ] Your problem has to do with the news group name of the article you included and with a 14 character file name restriction on SysV. Putting the following line with your other gnus customization (.emacs or elsewhere) will help: (setq gnus-use-long-file-name nil) ;; default it non-nil Info node: ================================================================ gnus-use-long-file-name's value is nil Documentation: *Non-nil means that a newsgroup name is used as a default file name to save articles to. If it's nil, the directory form of a newsgroup is used instead. ================================================================ Undocumentation: It gets used in gnus-apply-kill-file function, too. ================================================================ When you try to read a newsgroup, gnus tries to apply KILL hooks from kill files "$HOME/News/.KILL". When you try to save an article from a newsgroup, gnus tries to save it in "$HOME/News/". If gnus-use-long-file-name is non-nil, looks like "comp.compilers", else it looks like "comp/compilers". The latter will never bite you since there seems to be a maximum of 14 characters between punctuation in news group names. Since you have told gnus to use long names, but the OS cannot oblige, you got unlucky when "$HOME/News/comp.compilers.KILL" was truncated to 14 characters ("$HOME/News/comp.compilers") and assumed to be a kill file. This would only bite you if the length of the newsgroup is 14+ characters, else the truncated name would not exist. (e.g. "gnu.emacs.KILL" is less than 14 and doesn't conflict with "gnu.emacs", "att.workplace.KILL" truncates to "att.workplace." but will not collide not the default save file of "att.workplace"., "news.announce.important.KILL" truncates to "news.announce.", and collides with the save file name). My guess is that you just learned how to save an article from your favorite news group, then your favorite news group effectively got clobbered. That's what happened to me for "gnu.emacs.gnus". The first word in the file is "From", hence the error message. Make the variable change, and the problem will go away. If you'd like to append to your current save files, you will have to move them, since they will no longer be found as save files nor as kill files. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael S. Balenger (201) 949-8789 AT&T Bell Labs Room 1L-405 msb@ho5cad.att.com Crawfords Corner Road att!ho5cad!msb Holmdel, NJ 07733