gnus sharing between Linux and Windows - colon/underscore problem

[Sven Hansen]

Hi,

after a longer period of inactivity in usenet, I decided to dig out Gnus
again. I installed it in Linux and in Windows (as a native windows
program and under cygwin, too). My News directory is on a windows vfat
partition (in the home directory of my cygwin use). I also symlinked
this News directory to my Linux user's home directory, and some other
files like .emacs, .gnus, .newsrc and .newsrc.eld.

This appeared to work, but soon I was facing an annoying problem: vfat
doesn't accept a colon (   :   ) in file names or directory names!
An underscore (    _    ) is possible, though.

Thus group names such as:
nntp+news.gnus.org:gnus.ding
are not possible, in cygwin they appear as:
nntp+news.gnus.org_gnus.ding 

Which means, they get an underscore instead of a colon.

If I try to open such groups in Linux, however (using an ext3 file
system there), I get an "invalid group" error message! I have to edit
the group properties and replace the colon by an underscore.

But what is even more annoying, I cannot move interesting posts to the
articles cache, because again Gnus wants to create a directory name with
a colon, which is disallowed on vfat!


Now my question is:
What can be done to share my news folders hierarchy between Windows and
Linux?

What I do not want to do is:
copy the Windows News hierarchy to my Linux home directory each time I
switch between the operating systems. I do not want to give up vfat for
the windows partition either.

In fact, I absolutely want to use the symlink method, so I asked myself
(and now ask you):
Isn't it possible to change the way Gnus creates group names, by making
Gnus no longer use a colon but an underscore.

Since I am no expert in Gnus or lisp or coding in general, I couldn't
find any place in the Gnus help system or in "apropos" etc. where I
could change the way Gnus creates news folder names.

And I also ask you:
If indeed it is possible to achieve the above, will it break something
unexpected. Is it _vital_ or fundamental to use the "colon" in file
names creation?


thanks for any useful hints

Sven