Re: changing Gnus paths: 'News' and 'Mail'

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Eraldo Helal <eraldo@eraldo.org> wrote:

> I want to get rid of the 'News' and 'Mail' directories in my home and
> put them somewhere else instead:
> '~/News' => '~/mypath/News'
> '~/Mail' => '~/mypath/Mail'
> 
> Question: Which variables do I have to change so that gnus won't have
> troubles with moving those directories?
> 
> E.g.: If I change 'gnus-home-directory' from '~/' to '~/mypath/', will
> gnus-directory change to '~/mypath/News' or will it still be '~/News'?
> Making it necessary for me to change it as well. (and maybe others too?)
> ============================================
> 

Why not try it? Make a dot-emacs-modified-gnus with a different setting
of gnus-home-directory and the rest of your gnus settings unchanged,
start emacs with

       emacs -q -l dot-emacs-modified-gns

and check.

FWIW, C-h v gnus-home-directory <RET> says

,----
| gnus-home-directory is a variable defined in `gnus.el'.
| Its value is "~/"
| 
| Documentation:
| Directory variable that specifies the "home" directory.
| All other Gnus file and directory variables are initialized from this variable.
| 
| You can customize this variable.
`----

so it would seem that changing it would be enough to do what you want
(except that if you have explicitly set other directory-related variables
you might have to undo those, e.g.

,----
| gnus-directory is a variable defined in `gnus.el'.
| Its value is "~/News/"
| 
| Documentation:
| *Directory variable from which all other Gnus file variables are derived.
| 
| Note that Gnus is mostly loaded when the `.gnus.el' file is read.
| This means that other directory variables that are initialized from
| this variable won't be set properly if you set this variable in `.gnus.el'.
| Set this variable in `.emacs' instead.
| 
| You can customize this variable.
`----

I read this that gnus-directory is initialized *from* gnus-home-directory,
but a small amount of experimentation should settle the matter.

Similarly

,----
| gnus-article-save-directory is a variable defined in `gnus.el'.
| Its value is "~/News/"
| 
| Documentation:
| *Name of the directory articles will be saved in (default "~/News").
| 
| You can customize this variable.
`----

If you have explicitly set those, you probably want to unset them.
And there may be others of course.)

HTH,
Nick