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

[Matej Cepl]

On 2007-05-10, 14:16 GMT, Duncan wrote:
> 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.

OK, just to confirm that is doesn't work -- tried second time 
now, and when changed servers.xml to this (I have a local 
leafnode):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<server-properties>
  <server id="1">
    <host>localhost</host>
    <port>119</port>
    <username></username>
    <password></password>
    <expire-articles-n-days-old>31</expire-articles-n-days-old>
    <connection-limit>1</connection-limit>
    <newsrc>/home/matej/.newsrc</newsrc>
    <rank>1</rank>
  </server>
</server-properties>

On the first run when running pan (pan-0.129-1.fc6) it had 
correctly subscribed the same newsgroups as slrn, but with some 
read articles. However, after sthudown of pan, the .newsrc is
busted -- neither slrn nor pan (after recovery of the old .newsrc
from backup and trying again) see any NG subscribed.

I tried running it with strace and the result was strange -- when
running grep newsrc on both first and the second run of pan, I
got a slight difference:

address@hidden tmp]$ grep newsrc pan.strace
14579 access("/home/matej/.newsrc", F_OK) = 0
14579 open("/home/matej/.newsrc", O_RDONLY) = 6
14579 open("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC,\
    0666) = 6
14579 unlink("/home/matej/.newsrc")     = 0
14579 rename("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", "/home/matej/.newsrc") \
    = 0
14579 chmod("/home/matej/.newsrc", 0600) = 0
address@hidden tmp]$ grep newsrc pan.strace2
14586 access("/home/matej/.newsrc", F_OK) = 0
14586 open("/home/matej/.newsrc", O_RDONLY) = 6
14586 open("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC,\
    0666) = 7
14586 unlink("/home/matej/.newsrc")     = 0
14586 rename("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", "/home/matej/.newsrc") \
    = 0
14586 chmod("/home/matej/.newsrc", 0600) = 0
14586 open("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC,\
    0666) = 6
14586 unlink("/home/matej/.newsrc")     = 0
14586 rename("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", "/home/matej/.newsrc") \
    = 0
14586 chmod("/home/matej/.newsrc", 0600) = 0
address@hidden tmp]$ 

No idea, what's the difference between 6 and 7 as a return value
of open("/home/matej/.newsrc.tmp", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC,0666)
system call.

> It'll work better if you don't try to run them both at the same time, 

No, I never tried that.

> Additionally, note that while pan uses newsrc files for tracking groups, 
> the format apparently lacks a method for tracking multiple servers.

I have only one leafnode here.

> On the scorefile, I /think/ pan checks the standard ~/.news/Score 

No idea, I haven't tried that (and my ~/.news/Score is empty
anyway).

Any idea what's going on, please?

Matěj