[Pan-users] Re: Lost my configuration?

[Duncan]

Ron Blizzard posted on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:49:24 -0600 as excerpted:

> I don't know what I've done, but last night I ran Pan and was greeted
> with a "Welcome to Pan" dialogue -- and "first you need to set up a
> server." Brand new, like I've never used Pan. But I've been using Pan on
> this VectorLinux machine for over two months and would just as soon not
> rebuild my killfiles, etc. (Not that it would be that big of a deal, I
> only use two newsgroups.) But I still want to know what happened, if
> possible.
> 
> In my home directory I've still got the ".pan" directory and, as far as
> I can tell, all the information is still there. How do I get Pan to
> "see" my user information? And what do I do to get it *not* to see this
> information?
> 
> Thanks for any pointers.

What version of pan, and is this a machine that you've been using for 
awhile, or a home dir that you copied from your old machine?

I ask because pan hasn't used the .pan dir by default for quite some time, 
since the old and officially unsupported for years C based 0.14.x series.  
Newer pan (from the C++ 0.90 rewrite, which is like, half a decade old 
now, so it's not /that/ new), uses the ~/.pan2 dir by default, altho (with 
0.90+) you can set an export the PAN_HOME environmental variable to point 
to your location of choice, starting pan with that in the environment, if 
you want to override the default.

So assuming you aren't exporting PAN_HOME to change it (and assuming your 
distribution doesn't change it via distribution patch), you're either 
using a very very old pan, or that .pan dir is cruft left around from when 
you were, and you really did lose the .pan2 dir.

If you lost the .pan2 directory, it's likely due to some filesystem or 
hardware error.  You didn't mention what filesystem you use either, or the 
kernel version or anything... but if you do an fsck, you might have the 
missing dir show up in lost&found, at the root of whatever partition your 
home dir is on, possibly with a different name if the name was lost in the 
corruption as well.

If you're really using an old enough pan that the .pan dir is valid... 
well, I did keep an old pan version around for answering questions on it 
for years, but decided to clean it up, a couple months ago or so.  I think 
I was one of the last regulars here with it still installed, so I doubt 
you'll have much luck with specifics.  While there were similarities in 
file format, they're not generally compatible, thus the use of different 
data directories.  But certainly I and I expect others will certainly help 
when we can.

Perhaps it's time you upgraded to something semi-modern, like pan-0.133 
(itself over a year old), or even pull from the git sources either at 
gnome, or better yet, khaley's repository, and compile from them.

-- 
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