Re: why not just .newsrc?

[Emanuel Berg]

David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> writes:

>> One thing I don't understand is, if .newsrc-dribble
>> is used to track every little change, just to have
>> in case of a crash (which never happens), then why
>> not do that to .newsrc itself, keeping it up-to-date
>> constantly?  (.newsrc or .newsrc.eld)
>
> . That would increase the chance of a crash
> corrupting .newsrc.eld itself, instead of just the
> dribble file.

Yeah, I just can't recall a single general Emacs/system
crash in the past five years or so. But if you are on a
power supply that fails now and then I'd say you should
focus on fixing that instead of protecting the
.newsrc.eld, don't you think?

> . It would make it more difficult to quit Gnus
> without saving .newsrc.eld in case you did something
> stupid (you'd have to store undo information instead,
> leading to a reverse dribble file).

I don't know what stupid things you can do in Gnus,
except for stupid things to tell people... But if I did
a stupid thing in Gnus, I think most definitely that
should be "undoable" rather than to quit Gnus (without
saving .newsrc.eld), hold your thumbs, and restart
it... that's just lame.

The only example I can think of is killing groups in
the group buffer by mistake, but that is undoable with
the old Emacs keystroke, isn't it?

Note that I don't think that the dribble file is bad or
anything. Just thought there was some better reason for
it to exist. The crash thing you mention is of course a
valid point in a situation where crashes are common
and/or somehow externally unavoidable...

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573