[Pan-users] Re: messages refuse to stay marked as "read"

[walt]

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 07:15:54 +0000, Thufir wrote:

> For one group there are about 7k messages which no matter how many times
> I mark them as "read", then open that group, then go to another group,
> then select file, quit, they're still marked as unread when pan
> restarts.

After playing around a bit with pan I discovered a few things which
may help you find the bug.

When I mark a group as 'read', nothing gets written to disk until I
exit pan, when the following files are saved:
newsrc-*
posting.xml
preferences.xml
tasks.nzb
group-preferences.xml
accels.txt
newsgroups.xov

Of those, only newsgroups.xov and the newsrc-* files have anything
to do with article numbers, so I did some before/after comparisons
on those files:
newsgroups.xov before 'mark as read':
alt.binaries.pictures.animals 2055 1092 3:106143 2:267511
and after:
alt.binaries.pictures.animals 2055 0 3:106143 2:267511

Before 'mark as read':
newsrc-2:alt.binaries.pictures.animals: 0-267362
newsrc-3:alt.binaries.pictures.animals: 
0-103981,104204,104229,104296,104783-104784

After 'mark as read':
newsrc-2:alt.binaries.pictures.animals: 0-267511
newsrc-3:alt.binaries.pictures.animals: 0-106143

You can do some comparing of those files, even just by watching the
time-stamps on those file after each step you do in pan.  That may
at least tell you at exactly which step those files are being
changed as you mark a group as read, and you can further check to
see if the changes are correct.

It may take some time and work, but if it's really a pan bug it
will be helpful to report your findings.