[Pan-users] Re: 0.11.4 rebuild group descriptions

[Duncan]

Leif Harcke posted
<address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 30 Apr 2004 10:58:01 -0700:

> All group descriptions are missing.  I think this happened when I tried to
> use the import/export to .newsrc option.  I have since disabled that
> option, but "Servers"->"Get List of All Groups" doesn't make the
> descriptions reappear.
> 
>> do you know that the news server you are connecting to has the correct
>> Group Description info?
> 
> It's not a server issue, because slrn and Pan on the home machine which
> both use the same server each have the full group descriptions.
> 
> I could do "rm -rf ~/.pan" and start over again as a new user, but I was
> hoping to avoid that if possible.

0.11.x is a /very/ old version.  You may want to upgrade, altho that means
gtk2 will need to be installed as 0.12 began the gtk2 version.  (OTOH,
it's not Gnome2 dependent, as earlier versions were Gnome(1) dependent,
only gtk2 dependent.)  The reason is that few (no?) list regulars will
have that old a version installed any more, so you end up doing all your
own support.

With 0.14-ish, I could tell you exactly what file to rename so PAN could
d/l another.  However, the format has changed a bit in the ~2 years since
your version, and the 0.14.x filenames would likely do you little good.
Like I said, you are pretty much on your own as far as support for
anything that outdated.

Still, I was able to take a quick look in my ~/.pan subdirs and find a
good candidate file that might contain that data.  Looking in it with a
text viewer, it was easy to confirm that it had first, a list of all the
newsgroups available on the server, followed by a list of descriptions. 
If you have reasons to continue with such an old version (and who am I to
argue, it's your machine), and do your own support, I'd guess it should be
relatively easy to do the same and find the appropriate file, there.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
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Benjamin Franklin