Re: Gnus and rsync

[Nuno J. Silva]

Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com> writes:

> nunojsilva@invalid.invalid (Nuno J. Silva) writes:
>
>> Eric S Fraga <ucecesf@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>> nunojsilva@invalid.invalid (Nuno J. Silva) writes:
>>>
>>>> So I've now hit the issue where I have two computers on which I want to
>>>> keep gnus stuff on-sync.
>>>>
>>>> I've tried the simple solution: rsyncing the whole bunch of files (news,
>>>> mail, .gnus.el, and some other gnus files.
[...]
>>>> Unfortunately, this doesn't work as expected: in some mail folders the
>>>> unread messages are months old,[...] 
>>
>> What happens is that, after starting gnus, a lot of NOV files get
>> changed.
>>
>> Removing every nov folder (*/.nnmaildir/nov, relative to nnmaildir root)
>> before starting gnus forces gnus to regenerate these, what causes a
>> slightly long delay but works (that is, now the unread messages are the
>> same as in the original gnus setup).
[...]
>
> I tried a plain old sync for a while with gnus and  more often that not
> things went wrong.

It's sad, I'd really like if it were as simple as a naïve rsync. But at
least now I know it's not something weird in my config.

> The best way I found is to use offlineimap to sync a local dovecot
> server. Since gnus uses the server flags all is dandy.

Can you give me some more hints of what would that setup look like? 

I suppose it requires running an IMAP server (dovecot) on each machine I
want to use, and running offlineimap to sync both IMAP servers
(equivalent to rsync in the "plain sync" idea).

I'm currently using Gnus to fetch e-mails. As offlineimap was designed
exactly to sync newly created files, I suppose it will work - I just
need to change the mail folders from nnmaildir to dovecot and save the
new messages there.

What about performance? I suppose it's pretty okay, as the IMAP server
is running locally; and I expect offlineimap to take some more time.


Many thanks for your reply - it is pointing me towards a *working*
solution, and that's what I was looking for :-)

-- 
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg