[Pan-users] Re: auto-marking a message read

[Duncan]

John F. Waymouth posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:54:16 -0500:

> I've just installed pan, and so far I like it.  However, I have noticed
> that, somewhat unintuitively, messages that I read are not marked as
> "read" automatically; I have to hit M.  I've done some searching in the
> archives, and it seems like this is not standard behavior, but I
> couldn't find a way to fix it.
> 
> I don't think I've done anything strange.  The only thing that might
> have triggered a problem was that I imported a newsrc from my old
> news-reader, and once I had the list of newsgroups and read messages, I
> switched off "use newsrc file".  Thoughts/suggestions?

There used to be a setting for that in the GUI, but I don't see it now.
Maybe I'm missing it too, but I know messages are auto-marked read here,
so it's normal behavior.

Lacking a GUI setting for it that I can see, I went looking in the
~/.pan/data/config.xml file.  Of course, b4 editing this, I recommend you
make a backup, in case you make a mistake.  If you screw up the XML
formatting, PAN may not be able to read the other options.  Many of
us know, as one version of PAN was bugged and didn't save any
changes in options correctly, corrupting the format so PAN couldn't
parse it correctly and lost its config every time it was restarted.  (You
don't mention which version you have.  Maybe it's one of the afflicted
versions, if it's not up-to-date. PAN 0.14.2 is latest stable, 0.14.2.90,
I believe latest beta version, and what I am running.)

Anyway, the only option I could find there that looked likely was under
section key="Display". Here's that entry line exactly as it appears in my
config.xml (including the leading whitespace, assuming no wrapping
problems in mail transit):

      <value key="navigate_read_on_select" type="s">true</value>

If that value doesn't exist, is false, or if the format is somehow off,
that might be your problem, tho I didn't try modifying it (with PAN shut
down) and restarting PAN to verify what it did.

If that doesn't solve the problem, try (with PAN shut down)  renaming the
entire data dir, restarting PAN, and reconfiguring (at first) just one
group for testing by hand.  If it works there, then you know the problem
is somewhere in your config, and can either try continuing to work with
the new setup, or close PAN again, copy the old dir back (copy, so you
still have the backup in case you screw something else up), and try to
figure out where the magic setting is.  If it doesn't work even with a
from-empty data dir, it's likely something in either the PAN binary itself
or one of the libraries (or their configs) it uses, as installed on your
computer, is screwy.  Note especially that one library, IDR which one off
the top of my head, but you may have come across the discussion in
the archives, needs to be fairly recent, or it has i18n problems, tho I'm
not sure how that might relate to this.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin