gnus-no-server and startup level

[Jarmo Hurri]

Greetings.

Because I occasionally need to start gnus without any connection to the
network, I have for some time already defined all of my groups by using
secondary select methods. (I hope my terminology is correct enough.)  I
am not sure if this is the wisest way, but it has worked up to this
point. As a consequence, I always start gnus by (gnus-no-server).

However, I recently needed to change the levels of my groups so that my
imaps are level 1, nntps are level 2 and nnfolders are level
3. Everything else worked just fine, except that I could not get my
nnfolders to appear at startup, which caused additional problems when
sending messages (gnus was unable to find the nnfolder where the Gcc was
supposed to go).

So I tried this and that setting, until I tracked the "problem" to this
function:

;; --------------------------------------------------------------------
(defun gnus-no-server-1 (&optional arg slave)
  "Read network news.
If ARG is a positive number, Gnus will use that as the startup
level.  If ARG is nil, Gnus will be started at level 2
\(`gnus-level-default-subscribed' minus one).  If ARG is non-nil
and not a positive number, Gnus will prompt the user for the name
of an NNTP server to use.  As opposed to \\[gnus], this command
will not connect to the local server."
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((val (or arg (1- gnus-level-default-subscribed))))
    (gnus val t slave)
    (make-local-variable 'gnus-group-use-permanent-levels)
    (setq gnus-group-use-permanent-levels val)))
;; --------------------------------------------------------------------

So gnus-no-server starts gnus at level 2, and that is why I do not see
my nnfolders.

The easy way out would be to define a function / key that calls
gnus-no-server with argument 3. This, however, does not work for me,
because I also launch gnus-no-server directly from org (they were kind
enough to accept a patch for doing this); this is done by a direct call
to gnus-no-server, without any arguments.

So I guess my only choice (?) is to play with
gnus-level-default-subscribed. But this has not worked either. I have
tried to set it to value 4 in .gnus, and also in hook gnus-started-hook,
but nothing seems to help. Even if the variable has value 4 in the Group
buffer, I still can not see my nnfolders.

What's the right way to fix the problem?

BTW, finding the problem took quite a bit of work. Future generations
might appreciate it if someone would add a little warning text about
gnus-no-server in the manual in section "Group Levels", where the
display of groups is described otherwise.

--

Jarmo