[Pan-users] Re: Help

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:05:59
+0000:

> On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:07:39 -0400, Bill Wright wrote:
> 
>> I am new to Ubuntu I had PAN up and running, I don't know what happened
>> but I can subscribe to a group request headers, then that's it. Nothing
>> is downloaded, none of the message threads appear...
> 
> You mentioned that pan worked perfectly, but only once.  That would make
> me suspect that something has gone wrong in your ~/.pan2 directory.
> 
> I would try renaming .pan2 to .pan2.old and then start pan again and go
> through the setup stuff all over again.  Sort of a pain, but it would
> give us a big clue one way or the other.

This would appear to be another case of the bug I've mentioned several 
times now.  It has hit me on some groups, but not all.  I can confirm 
it's something local, that is, in the ~/.pan2 dir by default, but what?  
I'm afraid I still haven't had time to really trace it down.

I suspect there's a specific type of malformed post that pan is choking 
on, that causes it to never retrieve headers for that group again.  I did 
try a bit of troubleshooting using separate pan instances (set the 
PAN_HOME environmental var and you can have pan put its data files 
elsewhere than the ~/.pan2 default, I use this to run several 
independently configured setups), and replacing files between them did 
change things, but I hit a different bug (pan being able to retrieve 
posts but not remembering whether they are read or not) and ran out of 
time for troubleshooting, so since the originally failed groups were new 
ones I was just starting to follow I put things back as they were so I 
could continue to use the old ones, and that's as far as I got.

Meanwhile, I can confirm that resetting the data dir DOES eliminate the 
problem, but unfortunately it eliminates the memory of what was read and 
what wasn't, and other config settings as well, so it's not something one 
wants to do routinely.  However, since you don't have a big history and 
special config you want to keep around built up, no harm in trying it.  
It should correct the problem.  Since it doesn't happen to everyone, 
maybe you'll be lucky and it'll not happen again.

Or, if you are up for some big bug hunting, be my guest.  I'd certainly 
like to see this one squashed myself!  =8^)  I just haven't had the time 
to properly track it down here. =8^(

-- 
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