[Pan-users] Re: slrn and pan living together in harmony?

[Duncan]

Matej Cepl <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 09 May
2007 23:16:32 +0200:

> is it possible to make slrn live together with pan together, so that any
> messages read with slrn-0.9.8.1pl1-2a.cvs20070430 (used when I need to
> work remotely via ssh) are marked as read for pan-0.128-1 and vice
> versa? I tried to symlink both to change the line in servers.xml to
> point to ~/.newsrc and to symlink ~/.pan2/newsrc-1 to ~/.newsrc, but
> still both slrn and pan overwrote each others changes.
> 
> Did I miss anything?

It should be possible.  Charles has designed pan with that in mind, and 
pan uses compatible newsrc and scorefile formats.  However, I've not 
tried it so I don't know the details at least on the slrn side.

It'll work better if you don't try to run them both at the same time, 
since pan at least doesn't real-time save or track changes to those 
files, and slrn may not either.  I believe pan saves scorefile changes 
immediately, but only reads it when it starts and may re-save when it 
exits.  The various server newsrc files are loaded when you load a group 
and saved when you exit the group (or exit pan).  Thus, if both are 
running at the same time, it'll be difficult or impossible to keep the 
updates straight.

Additionally, note that while pan uses newsrc files for tracking groups, 
the format apparently lacks a method for tracking multiple servers.  As a 
result, pan uses multiple files, one for each server, and doesn't 
actually use the name "newsrc" even if you only have one server 
configured.  You will therefore need to symlink the appropriate newsrc 
files to bridge the differences in how they are named on slrn (whatever 
the specific differences may be, again, I don't run slrn).

On the scorefile, I /think/ pan checks the standard ~/.news/Score 
location and uses it if it finds one there, before creating its own.  
That's based on comments Charles made in discussions over where the file 
should be kept.  However, to avoid user confusion for pan-only users, pan 
will create the file in its own dir if it doesn't find the generically 
located one.  However, I /know/ pan is happy following scorefile 
symlinks, as I use them myself, for other reasons.  (I make use of the 
PAN_HOME environmental variable to run separate binary and text instances 
of pan, and use symlinks to a common instance of several of the config 
files, including the scorefile.)

-- 
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