Re: [Pan-users] Unable to upload binaries in Pan

[Duncan]

Dick Baker posted on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:25:01 -0800 as excerpted:

> But I've discovered a bizarre glitch in the subscribed group listing
> that makes me crazy.  See the attached snap1.jpg and snap2.jpg.  In
> snap1 you'll see an odd gap between the 1930s and 1950s groups--that gap
> is actually occupied by the 1940s group, but it's blanked out.  If I
> click on it in Pan, it appears, but now a later group,
> alt.binaries.test, disappears (shown in snap2).  And if I go down and
> click on the gap where alt.binaries.test should be, the 1940s gap
> reappears.  Utterly bizarre.  Have any of the rest of you run into this?

There's a feature that may be related to this, altho it appears to be 
buggy as active in your build.

Keep in mind that I run Gentoo Linux and don't do MS Windows, or indeed, 
OSX or any other proprietary software, including on Linux like the 
proprietary nVidia graphics drivers or the proprietary flash player, at 
all.  And I've been off of them since I upgraded to Linux in 2001 when MS 
came out with eXPrivacy and with it crossed a line I wasn't going to 
cross (if Linux wasn't around I likely would have been forced into piracy 
to avoid crossing that line; luckily Linux was, and I switched and a 
whole world of software freedom opened to me).  So to the extent that the 
MS version's behavior differs, I wouldn't be aware of it.

The feature in question is group colors.  Context/right-click on a group 
and choose edit selected group's preferences, or choose the same action 
from the edit menu.  At the bottom of the resulting group prefs dialog 
should be a group color option.  Try setting it to something else and see 
if that makes a difference.

In the main pan prefs dialog, on the colors tab, you'll find the default 
group color settings.  Here you can set both text and background color, 
while for individual groups you just set text color.

Those are application-specific pan settings.  GTK, the GUI widgets 
"toolkit" (the tk of gtk) on which pan is built, has other color settings 
as well, including the "selection" color setting, which is likely what 
you see when you select the group, and why it appears then.  On Linux 
there's various tools available to set the general gtk colors; the one I 
use is part of my kde desktop, the kde colors kcontrol module, with its 
option to set non-kde (in this case gtk) application colors as well.  On 
MS, I'd guess you'd simply get the default unless you have some gtk-color-
selector applet installed, tho in a pinch you could hand-edit a config 
file (after possibly creating it) to change the colors, as well.

But presuming you didn't deliberately set the affected group colors to 
white instead of the obvious default black, in which case I'd guess you'd 
know that and would have simply set it back (or set the default 
background color to something else), I'm at a loss to explain why those 
groups decided "on their own" to use different colors.

The possibility I'm aware of would be graphics glitches.  Perhaps your 
graphics driver's acceleration in combination with what gtk is doing to 
draw the entries under MS Windows may be triggering the blankout, tho 
typically those "wander around" a bit so wouldn't be reliably the same 
group, particularly if you resized the window.  Again, selecting a group 
uses different colors and perhaps different drawing routines, so wouldn't 
trigger the same blank-out.  Similarly, setting a different color, or 
even the same color but specifically setting it for that group instead of 
letting the default color drawing do its thing, could help, even if it's 
a bug in the graphics not in pan or gtk itself.

If your graphics driver has acceleration control, you might turn that 
down a notch or two /temporarily/ and see if it affects the problem.  If 
it does, you know it's a graphics accel issue, even if you choose to go 
back to the normal settings and use the color change thing instead.

And as I said, play around with both the default foreground/background 
group colors, and the individual group color, and graphics problem or 
something specific to gtk or pan, there's a good chance you can make it 
go away.

-- 
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