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[Pan-users] Re: after a PAN crash


From: Duncan
Subject: [Pan-users] Re: after a PAN crash
Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 06:09:41 -0700
User-agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table)

Travis posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below, 
on Sat, 14 May 2005 12:58:13 -0700:

> Every once in awhile PAN crashes and when I start it back up all the
> previously "read" articles come back as "unread".
> 
> PAN 0.14.2 is running on WinXP SP2.
> 
> Is this normal?  If not how do I fix it?

It's normal, for current stable and beta versions anyway, altho a lot is
changing in CVS, and therefore for the next versions of PAN.

What's going on with non-CVS, causing the behavior you see, is this. 
While in a group, for performance reasons, PAN doesn't write to disk the
status change every time you read a message.  It keeps that info in
memory, and normally only flushes it when you change groups, causing PAN
to flush all the changed info on the current group, and read in all the
overview info for the newly loaded group.

Thus, an effective work-around, if PAN isn't stable for you and you don't
like losing track of your read messages when it crashes and you restart
it, is to periodically switch groups (pick one with few or no messages and
it'll load faster), then switch back to the group you were in.  Pick your
period.  The longer you wait, the more unsaved read-message data PAN
accumulates.  So, any time you come to a convenient stopping place, after
you've finished reading a long thread, for instance, or just marked a
whole bunch of stuff read and don't want to lose that status change,
quickly switch to a different group then reload the one you were working
in.  Anything since the last group reload should now be safely saved to
disk.  If it isn't, it's your choice of file system or OS cache flushing
rules that's to blame, or your hard drive not flushing its cache, not
PAN's problem.

I /think/, but haven't actually fully verified, that you can reload the
group you are in (and thus flush current status to disk), without actually
switching to another group and thus losing your place, by simply
double-clicking your current group.  That /seems/ to reload it here, but I
haven't crashed enough while I was actually tracking doing that vs.
switching out and then back, to fully verify that it saves the full status
same as fully switching out and then back does.  So, either experiment
yourself, or switch to an entirely different group and then back, when you
want to be /sure/ it's saved.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html






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