Re: [Pan-users] How to change Pan's temp(orary) path to somewhere else?

[Duncan]

Ant posted on Fri, 01 Feb 2013 05:58:10 -0800 as excerpted:

> I'd like to change Debian (downloaded and installed through its 
> apt-get)'s Pan's temp directory (/tmp?) to somewhere else. I cannot
> seem  to find the configurations for this through GUI and my ~/.pan2/?

AFAIK, pan (you mentioned you're running the older 0.133 there, thanks) 
uses it's home dir for nearly everything.  That defaults to ~/.pan2/ as 
you mention, but you can point pan at a different location using the 
PAN_HOME environmental variable.

FWIW, here I have multiple pan instances setup (text, bin, test, ...), 
each with different config/cache settings, using the PAN_HOME trick.  I 
have a wrapper script along with several symlinks to it, setup so the 
wrapper detects how it was called (pan.bin, pan.text, etc) and sets 
PAN_HOME accordingly, before invoking the pan binary executable.  I've 
been using that same basic trick from I'd guess way back in 0.10x, 
perhaps even back into the 0.9x versions (the C++ rewrite that remains 
the base pan code we use today was introduced at 0.90, and I switched to 
it along about 0.95 or so).

So I know that code works and that pan puts most everything under 
PAN_HOME as I've been using that feature for quite some time, since well 
before 0.133 for sure, now.


The only things pan does outside PAN_HOME is (1) actually save files... 
to the location you've told it to save them, and (2) make use of a few 
common files such as ~/news/SCORE (or some such, I've long since 
forgotten the details) if they exist at a common location, where they can 
be shared with other news clients if they're installed as well.

There's a few possibilities.

1) Keep in mind that depending on the filesystem in use, "full" doesn't 
necessarily mean out of (normal data) space.  It can also mean out of 
inodes as well.  Additionally, it can be due to an inconsistent 
filesystem -- in which case doing an fsck on the affected fs may well fix 
the problem.

2) User quotas.  I've never used them here so I really don't know how 
they work, but if you're running them and your user quota is full on a 
filesystem...

3) Based on the above and the fact that the default PAN_HOME is ~/.pan2/ 
in your home dir, I'd suggest checking inode status on /home and/or 
fscking it, and/or checking quotes if you're running them.

4) Note that for many bits of pan, symlinks work just fine.  In 
particular, I've long run my binary instance with article-cache as a 
symlink to a dedicated partition (12 gig, with pan's cache size set 
accordingly, the default is a paltry 10 MB... back in 0.133 cache size 
could only be set by manually editing pan's preferences.xml, but in newer 
versions it's in the GUI), and all instances' scorefiles are actually 
symlinks to a single common scorefile.

Thus, you can try symlinking article-cache and the like to some dir on a 
different filesystem, and it should "just work", if you don't want to try 
to relocate the entire PAN_HOME elsewhere.

5) Of course another alternative to symlinks is bind-mounts.  You can 
accomplish the same thing as the symlink using a bind-mount to remount 
part of the filesystem appearing elsewhere on top of article-cache, if 
desired.

6) I'm not sure how pan actually saves files, but it's possible it writes 
a tempfile in the save location, then renames it when the file is 
completely downloaded and decoded.  If this is the case, then the tempfile 
referenced in the error may actually be in your destination dir, not in 
PAN_HOME or a tempdir, which means doing the above inode/fsck/quota/etc 
checks on it (assuming it's not the same filesystem as /home).

-- 
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