Re: [Pan-users] Pan not working

[Duncan]

Dieter Britz posted on Tue, 3 Jan 2023 10:37:39 +0100 as excerpted:

> Hi Duncan
> 
> thanks for the suggestion.  Does "reconfigure from scratch" mean
> removing and re-installing pan? After, of course, erasing all those
> files.

Removing/reinstalling isn't what I had in mind, no.

On Linux at least (I've been off MS since they introduced eXPrivacy so 
really haven't the foggiest how that works any longer) applications are 
normally installed at the system level (tho users can install their own 
copies but the assumption would be a system install), executables 
typically in /usr/bin, shared-object libraries in /usr/lib64 (for amd64 
anyway, just lib for 32-bit x86 and certain 64-bit mono-bitness archs), 
default config and documentation in /usr/share, and system services config 
that is typically modified from the defaults in /etc.

By contrast, (non-system-service) configuration, certainly beyond the 
defaults, and data, is normally user level, thus found under the user's 
home dir, typically under /home/<user>, which is often simply referred to 
with the ~ path notation (which shells typically substitute out with the 
actual user path).

This is what I had in mind, pan's per-user config and data cache, under 
~/.pan or ~/.pan2 (IDR which) by default.  If that's eliminated (with pan 
shut down of course), pan will start off clean, no memory of server, 
newsgroups, any settings you've changed from defaults, etc, and with all 
cached messages gone as well.

A quick test then is backing up this directory and wiping it.  If (once 
reconfigured) pan works correctly after that, the problem was obviously in 
the user config, and if desired, you can test further and restore specific 
parts of the old config from backup until you isolate what file was the 
problem.  (And if the problem turns out to be in a file that stores a 
bunch of different config settings, if desired you can then edit the file 
itself until you find the individual setting that was triggering the 
problem.)

If pan doesn't work correctly even with a clean/wiped config, then the 
problem is obviously deeper, a bug at the system level either in pan 
itself or in one of the shared libraries it depends on.

> The strange thing is, that I have pan on two laptops, one at work and
> one at home, and pan stopped working on both at about the same time.

That could be a system level problem, OR, particularly if you have the 
same server and/or groups configured in both instances, it could be, for 
example, that the same corrupted post hit both instances.  While a perfect 
pan (and shared-object libraries pan depends on) would be fine with that 
and at worst refuse to do anything with just that one corrupted post, bugs 
do happen, and it's certainly possible that due to a bug, some post seen 
by both instances corrupted them both in exactly the same way.  Of course 
it's also possible it's different posts or otherwise entirely 
coincidental.

Another problem I've seen is if the server resets its sequence numbering, 
perhaps because the old server died and they setup a new one and didn't 
carry over the old sequence numbers, or when a provider actually 
outsources to another and they switched providers (ISP news servers that 
switch the provider they contract with are/were the typical example here, 
tho unfortunately few ISPs provide news at all these days so that's not so 
common a problem any more).  In this case pan won't download the new 
headers because the server's sequence numbers started over and are too 
low, making pan think it saw them already.  Wiping the config resets pan's 
idea of what it already saw so fixes the problem, but if that turns out to 
be the problem there's actually a much smaller fix possible (just erasing 
the newsrc file, or even smaller, editing the file to remove all the 
sequence numbers) that won't wipe out the rest of the config, which is 
where having that backup of the old config comes in if you'd rather not 
have to redo the /entire/ config 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