Re: [Pan-users] server list broken

[Duncan]

David Chmelik posted on Mon, 14 Mar 2022 19:47:58 -0700 as excerpted:

> Another thing on this sort of topic is apparently I have dozens/hundreds
> newsgroups no longer on a server I use, possibly on another server I
> used (SDF.)  For some reason they're in my main (Eternal-September)
> .newsrc.  I think I was told refresh the groups list and they'll be
> removed, but they weren't.  I refreshed it several times over days/weeks
> and left Pan open hours after that, and on at least one occasion closed
> Pan after no longer said it was getting groups...
> 
> Another thing on this sort of topic is of course I used to use Pan to
> post to gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user but now Pan just says the posting
> profile's server (when Gmane selected) doesn't have this group (actually
> seems to be saying this about maybe all groups recently.)

With that many things going wrong, I'm wondering if your pan config is 
corrupted.  I'd also check your disk/ssd's SMART report, to be sure that 
isn't failing, and run various system diagnostics to be sure you're not 
getting power brown-outs and the like, and maybe a memory diagnostic as 
well, tho if pan's the /only/ thing acting up the system's likely fine, 
but it can't hurt to check.

Assuming nothing appears outright corrupted (no binary gibberish in the 
middle of a text file, etc), I'd ensure I had a backup of my pan settings, 
then either start clean and reconfigure, or if it's less work, start clean 
and restore the config from backup a file or a few at a time.  Luckily 
most of pan's config is text-based, with the files named such that it's 
fairly easy to see what each one does.  (An exception is the newsrc files 
which track groups on each server along with the per-server per-group 
read-message sequence numbers.  They're identified with a number and 
newsrc, with the mapping of which one goes to which server in the 
servers.xml file.)

What I'd probably do here is restore the general settings files such as 
preferences.xml and the hotkeys files (if you've customized hotkeys), and 
ensure that they seem to be fine before actually starting on the server 
config, which I'd probably redo from scratch.  The subscribed groups could 
go either way.  Then one by one I'd move the old newsrc files in place, 
manually editing the servers.xml file to map them as appropriate, so as 
not to lose the read-message tracking.  Tho the newsrc files could well be 
part of the problem -- perhaps the mapping between server and its newsrc 
file, as stored in servers.xml, got screwed up.  So you may need to dump 
the newsrc files and start over with that bit of the config, downloading 
the list of groups from each server again to initialize new newsrc files, 
and starting over with marking which messages you've already read.

Your posting.xml file, which tracks the posting profile settings, could 
also be messed up, so you might need to rebuild your posting profiles from 
scratch.

-- 
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