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

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff posted on Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:44:35 -0700 as excerpted:

>> Sorry I forgot to mention this earlier, as it did come up before,
>> when another user had the same issue.
>>
> As a matter of fact, no.  I have the same username on both machines, and
> use the same Usenet account.  And, to be specific, I'm the person who
> asked in the first place.

Ehh... the "before" I was talking about was quite some time ago, I'd say a 
year or more.  They were doing the machine syncing and ran into the 
problem you're mentioning now, and it was due to the absolute path issue.  
So unless that was you...

Anyway, the next two things to check would be the server order on both 
machines (as if it's the same servers but you set them up in different 
order, the newsrcs won't correspond... but if you rsynced both servers.xml 
and the newsrc files together, that shouldn't be an issue since servers.xml 
is what matters for order and it would have been synced along with the 
newsrcs), and file permissions (check the UID/GID numbers as well as 
names), just in case.  And of course check the perms of the dir they're 
in, as well.

It's the newsrcs that track read messages, tho, and servers.xml that 
specified which newsrc file corresponds to which server, so it's gotta be 
something to do with those files, whatever the problem is.

Beyond that, it'd be time to dive into the files themselves.  The format 
is standard newsrc format, which isn't hard to figure out, and is googlable 
if need be.  The numbers following the group name correspond to the
per-server per-group xref numbers of messages that are recorded as already 
read.  A server will number messages in a group sequentially (more or 
less, since some numbers may be missing, spam filtered or canceled or 
something, and depending on implementation, sometimes number will appear 
somewhat out of order), with that number along with the group it 
corresponds with appearing in the xref header. 

So the newsrc files work by tracking the xref number ranges of messages 
that are already read.  Any message xref that's not listed in the newsrc 
file will appear as unread.  And as mentioned, the servers.xml file tells 
pan which newsrc file to match to which server.  So the problem has to be 
somewhere in those files.

Oh, one more thing it could be.  You didn't rsync with pan already 
running, right?  Because pan only reads/writes the files at startup or 
when changing groups, so if for instance, you have pan set to start with 
your desktop session (as I do), and you start your desktop, then do the 
rsync, pan will be already running, so will overwrite some of the info you 
just rsynced when you switch back to it and change groups or quit and 
restart.

-- 
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