[Pan-users] Re: Subscribed newsgroups disappearing

[Duncan]

John Aldrich <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 24 Apr
2009 11:19:50 -0400:

> On Friday 24 April 2009, Gerald L wrote:
>>
>> Sounds like a permissions issue preventing Pan from writing to the
>> .newsrc file.
>>
> Well, that's weird. I had created a .newsrc file, but it still didn't
> work correctly, so I deleted the news servers and recreated them and it
> seems to be working now. I even closed and reopened Pan and the
> subscribed servers were there. :-)

Pan doesn't use the generic .newsrc file (at least not unless you 
specifically arrange for it to, see below), but rather, one newsrc file 
for each server configured (newsrc files don't do multiple servers, 
apparently).

When you configure a server, the data for that server, including the 
assigned server-N.newsrc path, are stored in the servers.xml file (which 
is along with all pan data, found in ~/.pan2/ by default).

There is one particular detail, however, that has caused a number of 
folks to find their subscribed group, etc. data disappearing at pan 
shutdown, after they reorganized their filesystem layout, moving their 
home dir but without setting up a new pan config.  The paths to each 
server's newsrc file as stored in servers.xml are apparently[1] NOT 
relative by default, but absolute.  Thus, with your homedir rename, the 
config was now pointing to a location that most likely not only didn't 
exist, but that it couldn't create as the permissions on whatever level 
of parent dir (possibly up to / itself) DID exist wouldn't allow the 
creation of the appropriate subdirs as set in servers.xml.  That meant 
pan could keep the config in memory, and for other files, could save them 
in the default location under ~/.pan2, but couldn't create the files or 
save the data that belonged in the newsrcs, as configured by no-longer-
existing absolute path in the servers.xml file.  When you blew away the 
servers config and recreated them, you naturally created new and correct 
entries in the servers.xml file, so it worked correctly once again.

This also explains why I've never had this sort of problem, since while 
I'm a heavy customizer and may move things around from time to time, I 
also know where the paths were since I customized them too, and thus 
adjust them when I adjust anything else affecting them.


[1] "apparently not relative".  I long ago hand edited mine to rename my 
newsrc files to correspond to the servers they cover, since I use 
multiple servers and that helps me track which newsrc file belongs to 
each.  As such, I really can't look and see what the default is any 
longer, but someone pointed this out when another poster was having this 
problem and it makes sense.

-- 
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