[Pan-users] Re: Pan forgets the groups

[Duncan]

Yavuz Onder <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 28 Dec 2008
23:22:29 -0500:

> I am a long time Pan user, and recently started with pan2.
> 
> After many weeks of problem-free use, all of a sudden, pan forgot my
> servers news groups as well as my subscribed groups.
> 
> Even after I re-populate them, after quitting, and restarting I find
> both subscribed groups and all groups lists empty.
> 
> Many times retrying did not help.
> 
> If I get all groups list from the server, and pick my group of interest,
> I can read, but as soon as I quit, all that info is lost.
> 
> What can I do, to get myself out of this bind?

This problem has been reported by a number of people.  I've never seen it 
myself so can only guess at the problem.  However, going over some 
possibilities...  If one of these helps and you can pin it down, or even 
say it was one of two or three, PLEASE PLEASE report which.  Likewise if 
none help.

1) Check your permissions for ~/.pan2 (by default) and subdirs.

2) Do an fsck on the volume/partition it's on (usually /home, if you have 
it on a separate partition).

3) Pan forgets some stuff if it crashes.  Try only downloading the 
newsgroup list, then quit pan without checking any groups or subscribing 
to anything.  Hopefully that'll get your group list back.  Then reload 
pan and hopefully they are still there.  Check preferences.  Make sure 
you do NOT have Get new headers in subscribed groups at startup, or when 
entering group, turned on.  If either are turned on, turn them off and 
exit pan, then restart.  Hopefully the settings stuck.

Now subscribe to the groups without actually downloading headers (this is 
why I had you turn off the auto-fetch).  Again exit and restart pan.  If 
the subscribed groups were retained, use the fetch headers for subscribed 
groups button or menu entry but don't go into them.  Again, exit and 
restart pan.  Now go into the groups and see if they work normally, 
keeping in mind that pan should save state for a group only when you 
leave it, so you'll lose the state for the group you were in (but 
hopefully no more) if pan crashes.

If it works correctly and you wish to, you can try setting pan back to 
download headers when starting pan or entering a group.  That may be part 
of the problem or not.  I don't know, but since I've never had the 
problem and I always have them turned off, you may just wish to leave it 
off and see if it helps.  <shrug>

4) If #3 didn't work, try it again, but running pan from a terminal 
window, to see if it outputs any warnings about not being able to read or 
save settings at some point.  There's also a --debug switch you can try 
if running from a terminal window.  See if that helps (but it might be 
too verbose so try it without the debug first).

4A) Optionally, you can try again using strace.  If you've used strace 
before you hopefully know how to work it.  If not, I could explain it but 
I'd like to try to avoid that if something else works.  You'll want to 
trace the access to the files listed in #5.

5) The group lists are stored in files named (by default) newsrc-
<digit>.  These should be standard newsrc format, a plain text list of 
groups for that server (one per server), one per line, with each group 
followed by a ! if not subscribed, or : if subscribed, and a list of 
article numbers that pan has seen from that server.  What should NOT be 
seen in the file are anything indicating binary corruption, or possible 
cross-links with other files.

You may wish to delete these files and start over with them, probably 
with step three, and possibly monitor them as in step four, to see if you 
can see where pan is going wrong.

6) Someone noted that pan hard-codes some paths to the default.  If 
you've set PAN_HOME and are running pan with a working dir other than the 
default ~/.pan2, see if changing back to the default changes your 
results.  (Of course if you've never heard of PAN_HOME or never set it, 
don't worry about this step.)

7) Something that's a bit different problem (pan failing to see some 
messages unless you have it redownload all headers, including old ones), 
but might be a problem here as well -- don't use the mark-all-as-read 
function, either the automatic version in preferences, or manually.  
Instead, to mark all as read, use the select-all headers function, then 
mark-read.  (If you have ignored messages not displayed, this won't mark 
them as read.  To do that, you'd have to temporarily set them to 
displayed before doing the above.  Here, I simply always display them, 
and use the score-column coloring to tell me which are ignored so I can 
delete or simply mark-read without even opening them.)

8) What version of pan and on what distribution (or is it self-compiled 
direct from pan.rebelbase.com sources)?  With pan thru 0.132, there was a 
security issue with the way it handled *.nzbs, including pan's own 
tasks.nzb file.  This problem should NOT occur with 0.133 which has the 
patch built-in, or if your distribution has patched 0.132 (as for 
instance Ubuntu 8.10 has, but 8.4 hasn't, last I knew, Gentoo has, SuSE 
has, Fedora... was the first to have the bug filed and create a patch, 
but the bug is still open, so I'm not sure whether they patched it for 
the distribution or not, that's 0.132, of course 0.133 from anyone should 
be patched).  Just to be sure it's not causing problems, you may wish to 
delete the tasks.nzb file (with pan closed of course), and then reopen 
pan and see if /that/ fixed the problem, even tho if it was the known 
tasks.nzb issue, it would have crashed on startup and you'd never get to 
the point of seeing whether the newsgroup list was there or not.

9) What desktop environment are you using?  Some people have reported a 
strange negative interaction between pan and certain versions of GNOME or 
one of its libraries on Ubuntu.  That was a different problem (pan 
hanging for a long time, a half hour, maybe up to an hour, sorting 
headers after downloading them), but the curious thing is that even tho 
pan is a GNOME application, the problem went away when people switched to 
another desktop environment, XFCE, KDE, anything other than GNOME.  
That's as far as we've traced it, tho we know it /used/ to work on Ubuntu 
with GNOME just fine.  <shrug>  Maybe this issue is related, or similarly 
tied to a particular desktop environment?

I really do hope one of these helps.  If one does and you can even narrow 
it down to a couple of them, it'd be a tremendous help.  And if none of 
them help and you faithfully tried all of the above, knowing that for 
sure would help as well.  It's pretty frustrating being a regular and 
seeing everybody else reporting a problem and wanting to help, but here, 
it "Just Works!" (TM)

10) If all else fails, have you tried clearing your ~/.pan2 (or whatever) 
directory entirely, and starting over?  Or better yet if you have admin 
rights on your machine so you can, try creating a clean new user account, 
no customizations at all, and see if pan works there.  If /that/ doesn't 
work, then it's a systemic problem, probably a system library issue or 
some such, and we've been looking in the wrong place.

-- 
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