[Pan-users] Re: Reproducible crash retrieving headers in million-header group

[Duncan]

Wayne E. Nail posted on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:57:09 +0000 as excerpted:

> Unrelated question: How does one avoid the 'You have lines longer than
> 80 characters. Fix that.' error in gmane composition when the stupid
> thing lets you exceed that in its own compose box?

Not a direct answer, but two possible alternatives that wouldn't run into 
the issue.

1) Did you know that the lynx text-mode browser handles news (among other 
things) in addition to the web?  It does. =:^)  I keep both it and links 
around mainly as emergency text-mode browsers, so I can google fixes for X 
or kde when they won't start, mainly, but in this case, it could work for 
news when pan's crashing, too. =:^)

2) Presuming you're using the gmane web interface due to pan's crashing, 
that's one of a number of reasons why:

2a) I keep the fetch headers on pan start, and on entering group, OFF.

2b) I set the PAN_HOME environmental variable, and use its ability to 
point pan at a non-default data-dir, to run multiple pan 
"instances" (perhaps "profiles" is more accurate), in my case, text, 
binaries, and test, each with its own separate config dir, subscribed 
groups, etc.  A crashing binary instance won't kill my text instance, and 
should the text instance die, I can use the test instance temporarily.

(The main reason I keep a test instance is that pan doesn't delete all it 
knows about a group when you unsubscribe.  At minimum, it keeps the record 
of the xref numbers in the newsrc file, even if unsubscribed, and I don't 
want groups I visited once, three years ago, perhaps checking out a test 
case mentioned here, (or for those umm... "exotic" groups, that might be 
hard to explain to the significant other, or the teen that knows more 
about the computer than you do and just happens across it while 
troubleshooting a... pan crash) continuing to hang around with xref 
numbers.  But it'd come in handy here, as well.)

So anyway, you shouldn't be limited to the gmane web interface unless you 
want to be.  (Tho I was for awhile, when apparently someone else on my ISP 
was spamming lists thru gmane, and gmane blocked their access to the news 
interface... and mine too, but that's a rather different problem than 
we're talking, here.)

-- 
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