bug#38136: [PATCH] Make gnus-group-get-new-news a non blocking thread

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

On 11/18/19 09:54 AM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> I haven't tried to make it raise an error, but I did set
>> `nntp-connection-timeout' very low, and try to trigger an error that
>> way. Nothing bad happened -- I will take a look at the code and see how
>> timeouts are handled.
>
> Try putting an (error) in `nntp-open-server' or something.  :-)

Oh, sure. I stuck errors in `nntp-open-server' and
`nntp-finish-retrieve-group-infos', and worked that both with a
nntp-connection-timeout and without, and wasn't able to drive it
completely off the rails -- unfortunately I did get two odd errors which
I was later unable to reproduce: one about selecting a deleted buffer,
which I think came out of `nntp-open-server', and another that looked
like "gnus-thread-group: " and then a chunk of bytecode. I don't know
how I got those, though!

The only other error I'm seeing now is if you start Gnus at a specified
level (ie "M-4 M-x gnus"), it will error out in
`gnus-get-unread-articles', line 1791, because it's expecting "(car
gnus-group-list-mode)" to be a number, but it hasn't been set yet.

In general, it would be great to have more code comments, particularly
in `gnus-get-unread-articles'. I'm afraid that we're going to end up
with more code that only one person really understands, touching on an
area of elisp (threading) that we're all kind of expecting to be
unstable.

That's all I've got for now.