Re: [Pan-users] Getting The Headers I Want

[Duncan]

Kevin van Houten posted on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 13:49:08 -0500 as excerpted:

> I'd like to know what I need to do to get Pan to download the headers
> newer than the headers I have in a group...and and them to the list of
> messages in the group, not replace them.
> 
> What currently happens.
> 
> I load Pan.  I have only 3 groups I regularly use.  rec.music.filk,
> alt.music.filk and alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke.
> 
> rec.music.filk is sitting there with all 40,000+ messages that giganews
> knew of the last time I used pan, be it earlier today, yesterday, last
> week, whatever.
> 
> I click 'rec.music.filk' in the 'Groups' pane...and then suddenly
> there's only 40+ messages listed.  The last couple of months worth.
> 
> Even if I am in the same session of pan...
>      and say I am in rec.music.filk and I 'get headers' and the 'get
> last 365 days of headers'...and it loads the 550+ headers since last
> October 10th...
>      and then I click on  alt.music.filk....
>      and then click back to rec.music.filk again...it reloads with only
> the last 40-something messages from the past couple of months.
> 
> 
> I have turned on and off every combination of things I would think
> relevant under edit/preferences/behavior/groups
> 
> I would be more than happy to 'get new headers in selected group' - as
> long as it didn't remove the entire history.

This sounds like an expiry problem.  In your server prefs for giganews 
what do you have the expiry set to?  IDR what the default is, but you can 
set it to any of the dropdown choices, and if that doesn't do it for you, 
you can set it to any arbitrary number of days you want by directly 
editing the servers.xml file in pan's homedir[1].

I like the "don't expire" option, here.  For my binaries pan instance[1], 
that lets me download a bunch of headers and messages, and work on them 
as I have time, deleting as I go.  When I'm done or decide to check for 
and download more, I can as long as I've deleted enough messages so my 
cache isn't full.

For my text instance I simply keep everything around as an archive.  I 
have messages going back to 2002 for some groups, including a few from my 
ISP's old server before they shut it down.  The server's no longer even 
there, but since I have expiry shut off and my text-instance cache set 
several gigs larger than the size of the messages currently cached, the 
messages stay around. =:^)

Related settings you may want to check are in pan preferences, on the 
behavior tab.  Check the article-cache settings, and also under groups, 
check the get new headers at startup and when entering group options, to 
make sure they're set how you want.  As I said, I keep a multi-gig cache 
(which you won't need for binaries anyway, if you direct-download-and-
save, instead of caching to go thru later, as I do), and definitely do 
NOT clear it at shutdown.  And I don't have pan set to get new headers at 
startup or when entering group, either.  I want the group to be the same 
way I left it, and can hit the get new headers button when I want more.

---
[1] Pan honors the PAN_HOME environmental variable if it's set in pan's 
environment.  If not, the *ix default is ~/.pan2/; I've no idea what the 
MS Windows versions use as I don't do proprietary and thus don't do MS 
Windows /or/ Apple OSX.

I actually use PAN_HOME to setup multiple pan instances using a different 
wrapper script for each, binaries, text, testing, setting PAN_HOME to a 
different location in each before starting pan, so each has separate 
settings and cache.

-- 
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