Subject: bug#34289: Mention why killed groups come back anyway next time one starts gnus

From: 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2019 06:53:13 +0800

ANYWAY, let's take a look at why I use
$ mutt -f /some/mbox
instead of gnus, for various simple mboxs laying around my system. For
gnus all I know is once it gets hold of a mbox, it is very hard to
completely eliminate the knowledge of it from gnus' vast dark interiors
with gnus' vast dark commands.

You fellows were talking about even viewing debbugs with gnus... no way!
It would surely leave some list of read articles somewhere in gnus vast
interiors (including SCORE lists, group kill lists, who knows.)

In fact, just like Google has a Data Retention Policy statement, the
gnus manual should, as an appendix, list all the ways one can be sure he
can finally get rid of each type of nn-this, nn-that mailbox, (along
with article KILL lists, group KILL lists, article SCORE lists, who
knows.) (Yes, gnus retains data on your home computer, not in the Gnus
Towers, but still needs a statement on how to get rid of it.)

I don't care one bit about "data privacy". I'm just looking at this from
the point of "can the user successfully reduce the size (bytes, lines)
of the various pieces of gnus back to what they were before he
'subscribed' to some mailbox. (Also what if he doesn't want to remove
the mailbox from the system, he just doesn't want gnus to "know about it
at all" anymore.)

Yes mention that gnus keeps some items (messages) for one week for your
own good... and yes documents how to get rid of them now...

And mention how the user can double check to be sure that he really did
clean the thing he wanted to out of gnus' vast Orwellian databases
that one currently must use lsof(1) and find ~ -mmin 111 etc. to track
down!

In fact
(info "(gnus) The End")
should also mention let's say the user wanted to eliminate every trace
of gnus's stuff from his $HOME.

First go through all the key strokes he needs.

That should probably leave a few lisp database files/directory
structure, almost zero size with no entries.

Then probably a few shell commands are needed to get rid of those too,
so he can finally get back to day 1 state before he started.

I'm not asking you to tell me the answer. (I long ago solved it via
"forensic analysis" and now that the data is gone, I also naturally
forgot the details.) I'm saying all this needs to be added as an
appendix to (info "(gnus) The End"). Getting rid of the memory of 1.
individual messages 2. groups 3. entire gnus.

Sure "It's all already documented. Bye." Yeah, scattered among the
various info pages, with no dedicated page for those who want to "How do
I permanently remove my ...".