bug#9244: 24.0.50; Server put offline without any prompt

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> The prompt may not always be welcome, but in practice I almost *never*
> want to go offline.  So I'd much rather default to "retry" than to "go
> offline".  And for my use, making this decision when Emacs prompted me
> worked pretty well.

Right.

The things that can happen in that piece of code are, broadly:

1) We opened the server successfully.  Yay!

2) We couldn't open the server, but it's covered by the Agent, and it
has the data.  Mark it as `offline'.

3) We couldn't open the server, and it's covered by the Agent, which
claims it doesn't know anything about it.  Mark it as `denied'.

4) We couldn't open the server.  Mark it as `denied'.

Previously 2) was special-cased.  It would query you, and if you said
`n', the next time you hit `g', it would (perhaps) fail again, and then
query you again.

I think handling 2) with a query, and not querying on 3) and 4) doesn't
make all that much sense.  Either you want to retry errors, or you
don't.

However, if you have a Gnus with ten different sources, some of them
will fail, and being prompted here is just annoying.  Gnus will list
failed groups specially in the group buffer, and you can `M-g' them to
force a reconnect.  I think that model makes more sense, overall.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/