Re: [Pan-users] New group-colors support, black default doesn't work with "reverse" color-schemes

[Duncan]

Bob posted on Sun, 17 Jun 2012 21:04:45 +0000 as excerpted:

> Thank you,  I use, the same as Duncan, a dark background (#474747) in
> four separate distributions.  This sort of corresponds to the 70% gray
> used in Black and White photograpy.  A number of other colors do have to
> be changed tho, for readability.

Just a note that the default group colors are working... with one minor 
glitch, but I'm not sure I'd call it a bug.  More like an after-effect 
from when it wasn't working.  So here's a hint for anyone seeing a 
similar glitch:

At first I thought it wasn't working, but then I paged down in "Other 
Groups" and saw that only the first few (plus some random groups further 
down) were still black after I changed the color (even after restarting 
pan).

I guess at some point long ago, I probably clicked on these groups, 
entering them temporarily and creating a group prefs entry for them.  I'm 
almost sure that's what happened for some of the groups further down 
(gmane.*.gentoo.* groups that I visited or subscribed years ago, but that 
I long ago unsubscribed and haven't visited in years).

Anyway, it seems that such "ghost entries" in group-prefs get the default 
color added to their prefs, and that they get it right away after 
starting pan (or possibly only after expanding "Other Groups", before I 
would have had a chance to reset the default color to something 
readable.  So they all had black set as their color, despite me never 
actually setting that for them.

The hint, therefore, for anyone who sees the same issue:  Two ways to 
fix:  Either:

1) With pan closed, open up the group-preferencess.xml and delete all 
these "ghost" group entries manually, being careful to delete everything 
from the opening <group to the closing </group> so the pairing still 
matches.  (This is what I did.)

2) In pan, go to each such group and set its color via group prefs as you 
normally would.  You'll probably have a number of no longer subscribed or 
only one-time entered groups with entries in the file, that will have 
somehow gotten the black color setting, that you'll have to reset to 
something else.  Or just leave them black if you don't have reason to 
worry about it.


The good news is that this should be a one-time issue, related to the 
fact that pan just added this new feature and in activating it, it 
happened to catch a few once entered but long forgotten groups in the 
process.

The only real way for pan to fix it would be to have a button to reset 
all group colors to the current default group color, and I think pan's 
prefs are busy enough, without adding a corner-case-use button for that, 
when simply erasing the group-preferences.xml file will already reset all 
groups prefs.

-- 
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