All subscription information is traditionally stored in this file. GNUS would read whichever one of these files was the most recently saved, which enabled people to swap between GNUS and other newsreaders. However, this will make it impossible to use other newsreaders than Gnus. It will also means that Gnus has no record of what groups are new or old, so the automatic new groups subscription methods become meaningless. The latter two are commonly used to turn version control on or off.
Version control is off by default when saving the startup files.
This buffer is auto-saved the normal Emacs way. If Gnus detects this file at startup, it will ask the user whether to read it. The auto save file is deleted whenever the real startup file is saved. The default is t . The dribble file will get the same file permissions as the .newsrc file.