[Pan-users] Re: 0.131 randomly deletes my preferences and/or groups

[Duncan]

Benjamin Esham <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 08 Jul 2007 13:29:09
+0000:

> By the way, a couple of moments ago I accidentally started two
> invocations of pan... oops.  Data loss again.  I'm not sure how multiple
> invocations are supposed to work—OS X allows only one copy of a program
> to be running at a time—but this seems like it shouldn't happen. Unless
> a more clueful *nix user corrects me, I'll file a bug on this.

I use multiple pan instances (text, binary, test), set up using different 
data dirs with the PAN_HOME environmental variable pointing to the one 
for the appropriate instance.  So it's quite possible for me to run 
multiple pan invocations without them tromping on each other, as long as 
they aren't using the same data dirs.

If you try to run multiple pan invocations on the /same/ data dir, yes, 
it can be "interesting".  pan saves the info for a group when you switch 
groups (on my request, I was running an unstable X at one point and 
having it crash and take pan with it, without saving state, going thru 
hundreds of messages again in multiple groups is NOT fun!), so as long as 
you realize what you did and quit the one right away, it should be fine 
except for that single group (and possibly global settings, if you 
changed any).

The other key is to quit (or move out of a group if you were in the same 
group in both invocations) the one you want status saved for /last/.  pan 
saves state at exit, so should remember the state on the one you quit 
/last/.

The problem that's left is if you don't realize you have two invocations 
running right away, and end up changing data in each.  Again, however, 
since pan saves and reads group data as you switch groups, it /should/ 
only affect a single group, since it would read in the updated data from 
the other instance on any new group you switched to.  However, if you've 
read a bunch of different messages in the same group, in each instance, 
/then/ it gets "fun".  Not!

-- 
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