Re: How to stop Agent from fetching headers of uninteresting Groups?

[N. Jackson]

At 13:57 -0800 on Thursday 2017-11-30, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
> nljlistbox2@gmail.com (N. Jackson) writes:
>>
>> How can I tell the Agent to not download even the headers for a
>> group?
>>
>> It seems I need an Agent predicate that is more strongly
>> negative than `false', something like `not-even-headers'.
>
> I don't think it's possible to do this presently -- looking at
> `gnus-agent-fetch-group-1', the headers are indeed fetched
> before the predicate is examined. In principle, however, there's
> no reason why this wouldn't be possible: we could retrieve the
> predicate higher up in the function, and ignore the group
> altogether (unless some articles had been marked specifically
> for downloading).
>
> I suggest using `gnus-bug' to report this and describe the
> situation; hopefully someone will get to it!
>
> Eric

Hi Eric, thank you for the response.

Today I discovered `gnus-agent-handle-level' which I think I can
use to do what I want.

  gnus-agent-handle-level is a variable defined in
  `gnus-agent.el'. Its value is 5

  Documentation: Groups on levels higher than this variable will
  be ignored by the Agent.

  You can customize this variable.

All my news groups are currently at a subscribedness level of 3
(the default), so I'll bump up the subscribedness of the groups I
want the agent to retrieve anything for to level 2 and set
`gnus-agent-handle-level' to 2 as well. This should solve my
problem in a tidy way.

In fact, this seems to be such a natural solution that I'm not
sure that there is a need for a new feature, so I won't file a
feature request unless this plan doesn't work out for some reason.

N.