[Pan-users] Re: Problem syncing two copies of Pan

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff posted on Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:35:30 -0700 as excerpted:

> I recently followed the advice from this list and synced the copies of
> Pan on my desktop and laptop with rsync.  (Using Fedora 13 Linux on both
> computers.)  All seemed to go well, but the first time I opened the copy
> on my desktop after syncing, it marked all of the messages from the last
> 12 days (while I was away from home) as unread.  I had to re-sort them
> by date and manually mark the older, previously read articles as read
> again.  The command I used was:
> 
> rsync -avr address@hidden:~/.pan2 ~/.pan2

Whatever command you used, it appears gmane unfortunately detected it as 
including an email address and munged it accordingly...

> As far as I could tell, all of the appropriate files were updated,
> including those in subdirectories.  Is there a file someplace else I
> needed to copy?

First, please don't hijack threads.  You apparently replied to a post of 
Benjamin Esharn, inquiring about a compile error on OSX, simply deleting 
the subject line and replacing it with your own.  That doesn't start a new 
thread but rather hijacks the old one, as the references and in-reply-to 
headers still contain the message-ids of previous messages in the thread 
and will be threaded accordingly, on clients (including pan) that honor 
those headers.  To start a new thread, use a new message, not a reply.

To your question:  The files that actually track read/unread are the 
(standard format) newsrc files.  Pan has one per server.  To see which 
files are actually being used, check the servers.xml file.  I believe pan 
normally uses filenames like newsrc-1, newsrc-2, etc, tho I've customized 
mine by editing the servers.xml file and the newsrc filenames so I can see 
which server each belongs to: newsrc.gmane, newsrc.cox, for my text 
newsgroup instance pan config.

Note that the servers.xml file includes the full absolute path to the 
newsrc file.  What probably happened is that your username is different on 
each machine, so while the files got rsynced, the path was different and 
pan couldn't read the new location, as the absolute path pointed to a 
user's homedir that doesn't exist on both machines.  Sorry I forgot to 
mention this earlier, as it did come up before, when another user had the 
same issue.

Assuming the absolute paths issue is your problem, you have several fix 
alternatives.  First, you can setup the users (or more importantly, the 
user's homedirs) to match on both machines and alter the absolute paths in 
the servers.xml so they match.  Second, you can accomplish the same thing 
by setting up symlinks for the newsrc files in question on one machine, so 
the servers.xml file path is symlinked to the correct location.  (That 
should work, I've not tried it with the newsrc files, but I know pan 
correctly uses symlinks for various other files I've symlinked over the 
years.)

Third, you can edit the servers.xml file paths to be relative (perhaps 
just the filename, so it looks in the PAN_HOME directory) instead of 
absolute.  (Untested.  Pan might overwrite the path with the absolute 
version the next time you make changes to the server config, for instance, 
in which case it'd work until then and you'd simply have to learn to make 
any server config changes manually.)

Fourth, you can edit the absolute paths as appropriate on each machine 
(they're probably rsynced to be the same, now, so the one is pointing to 
the wrong place), then put the servers.xml file in your rsync exclude list 
when you do the rsync again next time.  (Hint: If you setup a shell 
scriptlet or alias with the command you use, you can alter and test that 
until it's correct, and not have to worry about getting the rsync command 
exactly right each time you use it, as you can simply invoke the script/
alias.)

-- 
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