[Pan-users] Article fetch fallback strategy

[Rhialto]

I have the impression that the mult-server fetch strategy of Pan is as
follows. It keeps headers of its various servers, and remembers which
server claims to have which articles.

When a multi-part article is to be saved, it looks at all the parts and
assigns which server is going to supply which. Then, it tries to
download them from those pre-determined servers.

However, my news server quite often claims to have some article, but
then when Pan tries to fetch it, it doesn't have it.

However there is now no failover to another server. In the mean time,
the article stays Queued at for instance 95% and never finishes.

I found a tedious workaround. What I can do is to edit the news servers'
priorities. Then I need to remove the articles from the download queue
and re-save then. Only then the new server priority settings take
effect.

If this happens for a significant number of articles it is a lot of work
to do, and if you wait for all downloads to cease, maybe not everything
that is downloaded but not decoded is in the cache anymore.

I'm looking in the code (starting at task-article.cc which seems related
to this) to see where this happens and if I can change it, but I'm not
familiar with the code and it's quite complex. Maybe somebody with more
experience / knowledge can have a look?

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert  -- The Doctor: No, 'eureka' is Greek for
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl    -- 'this bath is too hot.'

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