Re: gnus-kill-newsgroup error

[Richmond]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> writes:
>
>> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>>> Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Due to my computer dying I lost some changes. One of which was to stop
>>>>>> subscribing to new groups. But even though I reapplied this change, I
>>>>>> was unable to launch gnus because of this error. I cannot find any
>>>>>> reference in the lisp to this function gnus-kill-newsgroup but something
>>>>>> is calling it and then failing. I got gnus working in the end by
>>>>>> removing the mozilla server from .gnus.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There was a reference in to this function in .gnu-emacs but I renamed
>>>>>> this file to dotgnu-emacs but still the error occured. Can functions get
>>>>>> copied around?
>>>>> `gnus-kill-newsgroup' was removed from Gnus (or at least this Gnus
>>>>> change was merged into Emacs master) in 2012, so it's been a while.
>>>> Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.3 (gnu/linux)
>>> That's a pretty old Emacs -- is there a chance you could upgrade to 26?
>>> 27 is almost out.
>> Probably but I am not sure I want to just yet. On the last system which
>> is now dead I did upgrade but it caused various other problems.
>>
>>>>> What version of Emacs are you using? You're not still loading an
>>>>> external Gnus installation, are you?
>>>>>
>>>> No. I had to re-install linux etc. So starting from scratch.
>>>>
>>>>> You talk about changes, and "reapplying changes", what does that mean?
>>>> Some time ago, maybe a couple of months, I asked in this group why gnus
>>>> was subscribing to groups and as a result of that I made changes to
>>>> .gnus and got rid of .gnu-emacs-custom
>>>>> What seems most likely is that you've got some custom functions in
>>>>> your.gnus.el or elsewhere that are still calling `gnus-kill-newsgroup'.
>>>>>
>>>> The problem is I cannot find any reference to it.
>>>>
>>>> I do this:
>>>>
>>>> find . -type f -print|xargs grep -i gnus-kill-newsgroup
>>>>
>>>> All it finds is this:
>>>>
>>>> ./dotgnu-emacs:       (gnus-kill-newsgroup newsgroup)))
>>> So presumably this file is getting loaded somehow? I don't see that
>>> that's a standard filename of any sort. If you look at that file, what
>>> is that code a part of?
>> I don't think it is getting loaded, although it might be. But it was the
>> file which was called .gnu-emacs which I renamed to dotgnu-emacs so that
>> it wouldn't get used. (dot = . )
> If it's not getting loaded, I can't think of what else could be causing
> the problem. Unless you've got some old *elc files lying around from a
> previous installation. But if you're confident that you've searched all
> the relevant locations, I'd say this file is still your culprit.
I have changed the permissions on the file to zero so that it could not
be loaded, but I didn't get any error.

I am not able to prove much now, one way or another, because I removed
and re-added the mozilla newsgroup.

I have an idea which is pure speculation that gnus had somehow recorded
its intention to kill some newsgroups because that's what I had been
doing - killing new groups which I had been subscribed to, using ctrl-k,
and so gnus was trying to finish this task on startup. But I can't see
how this would have been recorded anywhere without recording the name
"gnus-kill-newsgroup", unless it was encoded.