[Pan-users] Re: recurring annoyance

[Duncan]

Thufir <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 14 Oct 2007 07:11:55
+0000:

> I'm having to resort to periodically deleting or renaming some pan
> files, specifically those in /home/thufir/.pan2/groups/ for some groups
> because no matter how often I mark messages as read, and no matter the
> sequence I use to exit out of pan, the messages continue to be marked as
> unread.
> 
> I posted about this before, and thought it to be a one-time issue but
> now it's getting to be chronic.
> 
> Is there a logfile or something similar which I could post to help pin
> down why this is happening?

This may be related to a different but ongoing problem I've mentioned 
before.  Basically, I have some groups in my main text instance of pan 
that refuse to update.  Using my test instance (with each "instance" set 
to use a different config/data dir by setting the PAN_HOME environmental 
variable before pan starts), without the group read message history I've 
built-up in my main pan text instance, but with the same server config, I 
can download messages in the problem groups just fine.

Here's why I say the problems may be related.  While troubleshooting, I 
backed up the files in my main text instance and imported some of the 
ones from the test instance.  I could then update all groups, including 
the new groups that wouldn't update before, but I ended up with your 
problem -- several groups including some of the older ones that I'd had 
no problem with previously, now couldn't properly track read messages.  
They kept marking the same messages over and over as unread.

The big problem here is that the groups in question are on gmane, which 
archives mailing lists as newsgroups, with history on some lists/groups 
going back years and tens of thousands of posts.  That's a LOT of posts 
to have to keep marking as read every time I restart pan!!  Now, with a 
large basically permanent cache, I could track messages I've downloaded 
previously by the fact that they are shown as cached, even if not marked 
as read.  However, the problem is that I'll often re-mark a message as 
unread, to respond to later, even after it's downloaded.  Thus, if I 
relied on the cached status to track read/unread, I'd lose track of all 
those messages I had been keeping marked unread, to deal with later, and 
it's simply too much hassle to sort thru them manually, looking for the 
messages I wanted to deal with later and keep them marked unread, while 
marking everything else read again, repeatedly.

Since my main groups at least worked (both updated and stayed marked read/
unread as I left them) before, I restored my backup and simply haven't 
been active in the new groups that refuse to update.

As I've said before, I keep trying to get around to tracking the issue a 
bit better, filing a bug report with the details, etc.  However, I've 
been working a lot of hours lately, rather more than normal, and it just 
hasn't happened.  It's frustrating as the list of computer and other 
stuff I've been putting off keeps getting longer and longer... but my 
budget sure has appreciated the extra cash each payday, and I'm making 
faster progress toward some personal financial goals than I had been.  
(The raises I've gotten recently also help make the extra working time 
worth it, so I've not been complaining /too/ much; it really wasn't worth 
putting in extra time, there for awhile. =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