Re: [Pan-users] Gray threading background for one particular newsgroup.

[Christian Dysthe]

On Wed, 2014-07-16 at 09:50 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> Christian Dysthe posted on Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:19:08 -0500 as excerpted:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I am having a strange problem with Pan built from git (GTK 2). One one
> > particular news group the threading indication/indentation is gray. On
> > all other newsgroups it's white. I have tried to unsubscribe to this one
> > newsgroup and then add it again, but I get the same result.
> > 
> > Here's a screen shot of the group that get gray background:
> > 
> > https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2vpfleqxs7y27t/Pan140-2.png
> > 
> > Here'a a screen shot of how all other news groups look:
> > 
> > https://www.dropbox.com/s/w829sjrkudffmuj/Pan140-1.png
> > 
> > Any idea why that one group get the gray background? Is this a setting
> > somewhere that I am missing?
> 
> Heh, your color-scheme is /entirely/ different than mine.
> 
> This shot's a bit old (2013) but still representative.  Pan is on the 
> middle monitor.  Note that it's a triple full-HD monitor stacked desktop 
> for a full 1920x3240 px screenshot, full-size, so you'll probably need a 
> scaling viewer to see the full thing at once, then scale to 100% to see 
> it at full-size and scroll around, tho even "full size" won't do it 
> justice unless you're running 42-inch TVs as monitors as I am (for the 
> bottom two, anyway).
> 
> http://wstaw.org/m/2013/05/11/duncan-fullscreen.png

Sure is different! Yours has more of classic terminal colors with
transparency while mine is very flat using the Numix gtk and icon theme
in Gnome-Shell.
> 
> 
> Tho I've switched pan's groups and body panes so groups is on the left 
> now, and I got new contacts and reduced the font sizes somewhat.

I prefer all panes stacked. Used it like that since forever.
> 
> Anyway...
> 
> That is indeed a rather strange problem.  Given my dark-background color 
> prefs I've had my share of strange color issues on pan and elsewhere, but 
> I don't recall seeing anything like that, certainly not for one group 
> only.
> 
> Based on the above you are already building pan against gtk2, which would 
> be my first recommendation, since pan built against gtk3 mostly works, 
> but people do report strange issues with it reasonably frequently, that 
> go away when they build pan against gtk2, and the gtk3 port simply 
> doesn't get the testing or wide deployment of gtk2, so... But you're 
> already building against gtk2, so that can't be it.

I have built successfully against gtk3 and Pan works except for one
thing: When I scroll through a newsgroup suddenly the whole window
resizes seemingly by opening certain messages. The window suddenly gets
much wider. I have to reset it to preferred width, but it resizes again
later when I hit one of those "trigger messages". I do not think I have
the skills to determine why a certain message causes this resize
> 
> Tho it wouldn't hurt verifying that.  Run ldd pan in a terminal window, 
> and check that it's not loading any gtk3 stuff.  As I don't even have gtk3 
> on my box, it can't load it here, but verifying that it's only doing gtk2 
> on a box with gtk3 can't hurt.  In particular, my libgtk and libgdk lines 
> look like this (gentoo ~amd64 box, hex numbers omitted):
> 
> libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /lib64/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /lib64/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
> libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /lib64/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0

Mine:
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
=> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0

> 
> FWIW, my gtk/gdk-pixbuf/cairo versions are as follows (the -r3 on cairo 
> is a gentoo-specific revision number indication):
> 
> gdk-pixbuf-2.30.8
> gtk+-2.24.24
> cairo-1.12.16-r3
> 
> The other possibility is that it's a color issue.  You don't happen to 
> have any scoring set that might apply to all articles in that group, do 
> you?  You can try fiddling with pan color prefs a bit, both for scores 
> and for "other text", and see if that affects it.  But I don't see how it 
> could for just that group, /unless/ it was related to a score you had set 
> that happens to affect everything in that group and little or nothing 
> else, but score colors normally only affect the score column, so that 
> shouldn't be it either.

No scoring set as of present.
> 
> The only really group-specific settings are visible in group 
> preferences.  There's color, which normally only affects the group pane 
> so shouldn't have any effect on the headers pane, and charset.
> 
> Charset!  That might actually be it!  Might there be some post in that 
> group with a strange charset used in either the subject or author 
> header?  Since the threading indention is in the subject column, that 
> would be the strongest candidate.  If there's some exotic charset used in 
> a subject header, it's just possible that gtk's processing of it triggers 
> a rendering bug that results in the off-color seen in whatever pan or gtk 
> is using for the header spacing.  If pan's using an exotic space 
> character as it's threading spacer, as it might be...  Admittedly that's 
> reaching a bit for an explanation, but it's the best one I can think of 
> that fits the evidence we have so far.

And there it is! There was a post with on of those white vertical
rectangles indicating a character that couldn't be rendered. I removed
that post and restarted pan. Problem solved!

I do not need to go through the procedures below I guess, so thank you
for looking into this and pointing me in the right direction!
> 
> If the group was unaffected until a certain date, and now it's doing 
> this, you might check the posts around that date...
> 
> You can also try:
> 
> 1) With pan not running, move pan's data dir elsewhere temporarily, and 
> restart pan with a clean config and no groups loaded.  Fill in your 
> server info and visit just that group.  Pan won't have a record for it so 
> will prompt to download headers.  Try getting just the last say two 
> headers, then tell it to get say 10, etc, until you can see at least one 
> threaded header.  Does it show up then?  If not, try getting a few days/
> weeks worth of headers and see if it shows up.  Then try downloading 
> headers back as far as you had them in your normal config (assuming your 
> server has enough retention for that, of course).  Does it then show up?
> 
> The idea being to see if it's in a clean config, and if the headers of 
> some message trigger the problem.
> 
> 2) Try the same thing, but start with a fresh full user config, either 
> configuring a new login user for the test, or temporarily moving your 
> entire user config to backup so it starts with an entirely clean user 
> config.
> 
> Of course the idea here is to see if it's something in your user config, 
> by starting with an entirely clean one.
> 
> 
> That should give us some data on where the problem is, anyway.  If it's 
> happening with a clean user config, then it's something either at the 
> distro level or upstream.  If it's not happening there, but it's 
> happening with a clean pan config, then it's gotta be something in your 
> user config.  If it's not happening with a clean pan config on your 
> existing user, but starts happening when you download a bunch of headers 
> for that group, then it's gotta be something in those headers triggering 
> it, tho the problem's probably at the distro or upstream level.  If it's 
> not happening in a clean pan config and doesn't start happening when you 
> download all the headers that you had in the group before, then it's 
> gotta be something in the pan config, unless of course you couldn't get 
> all the headers you had before due to server retention policies for that 
> group, in which case it could still be something in the message headers.
> 

-- 
//Christian
Dropbox. Your files from anywhere: http://db.tt/U8MqkVR