Subject: Re: bug#34983: 27.0.50; Gnus cannot start

From: Bastien <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2019 07:36:21 +0100

Hi Eric,

good luck with fixing this.

Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> This is frustrating -- this was the most important part of the patch,
> and the part I thought I'd tested most thoroughly. At worst I think Gnus
> may be trying to read .newsrc.eld using the wrong encoding, so I don't
> think you will have lost anything permanently. (Still, I'm very sorry
> this is causing you Gnus outage.)
>
> First -- did you run "make bootstrap" before running this new version?

No.  I regularily build Emacs from the master branch but I only use
`make' to compile it then.  I had no idea I had to `make bootstrap'.
Why was it necessary after your commit?

> Second, can you tell me if your non-ascii group names are being saved in
> .newsrc.eld in utf-8, or if they have literal byte sequences in them?

There is no literal byte sequence in the .newsrc.eld file that I was
able to backup, right after I got this Gnus initialization error.

Now I recompiled an Emacs from before your commit.  Starting with my
backup does trigger this error:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
  intern(nil [0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...])
  gnus-make-hashtable-from-newsrc-alist()
  gnus-read-newsrc-el-file("/home/guerry/.newsrc.el")
  gnus-read-newsrc-file(nil)
  gnus-setup-news(nil nil nil)
  #f(compiled-function () #<bytecode 0x1559c202fd35>)()
  gnus-1(nil nil nil)
  gnus(nil)
  funcall-interactively(gnus nil)
  call-interactively(gnus record nil)
  command-execute(gnus record)
  execute-extended-command(nil "gnus" "gnus")
  funcall-interactively(execute-extended-command nil "gnus" "gnus")
  call-interactively(execute-extended-command nil nil)
  command-execute(execute-extended-command)

... so I suspect I did not save my .newsrc.eld in time to properly use
it with a stable Emacs (too bad).

I hope I will be able to find my group subscriptions and my marks.

I'm trying to better understand a few things, can you educate me?

What is the Gnus "active" file?
Where is it on my computer?
What is the .newsrc.eld file?
What is the difference between .newsrc.eld and the active file?

Thanks,

-- 
 Bastien