Re: Debugging an imap connection in gnus

[Paul Bibbings]

Paul Bibbings <paul.bibbings@gmail.com> writes:

> I've been reading my gmail in gnus for some while now, and without
> issue.  I'm running gnus v0.11, emacs 23.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002) on
> Windows Vista.  To connect to my gmail I've been using imap with an ssl
> connection that uses a version of openssl bundled with the Cygwin
> environment.  Today there was a major upgrade of Cygwin to 1.7.2-1
> coupled with a release upgrade of openssl to 0.9.8m-1.  After the
> upgrades, I can no longer connect to the imap server from gnus.

<snip />

Responding to myself, I have managed to solve this without having to try
and decipher the error messages I was getting from Gnus.  It turned out
to be something very remote from either Gnus, or Cygwin for that
matter.  In my environment variables on my Windows installation I had
(for whatever reason)

   SHELL=C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe

That's odd, in itself, since Windows doesn't need bash as a shell, and
Cygwin would need this to be /usr/bin/bash.exe.  Having upgraded Cygwin
today I found that this EV confused both mintty and xterm and so I
changed it to SHELL=/usr/bin/bash.exe and they both started working
again.  But it was /this/ change that broke openssl when it was called
from Emacs, while it still worked from bash.  The truth is, all three -
mintty, xterm and Emacs (Gnus) /would/ read this EV if it was there, but
none needed it.  So, it was simply a matter of removing it and
everything works fine again.

I notice that other people who have upgraded Cygwin today are having
similar problems, so this is just to post something in case anyone else
is scratching their heads over similar problems.

Aside from that, apologies for the noise.

Regards

Paul Bibbings