[Pan-users] Re: downloaded messages no longer marked, plus a request

[Duncan]

jef_e <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 08 Oct
2006 11:31:44 -0400:

> I don't see a bug for this on a quick search, but with 0.115, I am
> seeing that over time, downloaded articles are losing their downloaded
> designation icons. If I close a group, go to others, then eventually
> come back to a group, I see that articles that I've downloaded are no
> longer marked as downloaded by the stacked disks icon.
> 
> Am I missing the bug report for this? If anyone can confim, I can also
> file one if it doesn't exist already.

Confirm your observation, but NOTABUG (unless you are seeing something
different than I am here). It's the old cache size thing.  pan's default
cache size is 10 MB, and you are probably exceeding it.

In old-pan, there was a cache size setting.  New-pan doesn't have one in
the simplified settings dialog, but /does/ have and honor the setting in
the config file, so along with a few other things, you have to edit it
there to make the change.

I do things a bit different than it would appear most do, downloading to
cache then sorting thru everything later, and was always very frustrated
with pan's tiny cache.  I was the one that got old-pan's max cache size
setting raised above the original gig, as I used about four gig, which
back then was about the most pan could handle without taking all day to
open anyway.  However, Charles made it 20 gig IIRC.

In new-pan, which works far faster and with less memory, on my binary
instance (I have several instances, using the $PAN_HOME variable to keep
pan using the set of config files I want), I have the cache symlinked to a
dedicated partition, a full 12 gigs in size, and I've used upto about 10
gigs of that anyway without issue, having changed the config file cache
size to 15 gigs or so so it would actually run out of room on the
partition before it would start killing stuff in the cache.  (That hasn't
happened as I tend to download a lot to cache, then work locally until
it's sorted, deleting headers as I'm done with them, then deleting the
cache when I've everything sorted, to go the next download round.)

So, set that appropriately and the problem should disappear.  I forget the
exact setting and don't have time to look it up ATM, but it's in the main
preferences.xml file (under ~/.pan2 as the default location), and a search
for "cache" should bring up the line fairly easily.

> This touches on something I'd like to see make a comeback -- New vs.
> Unread vs. Read -- even though when I first started using Pan, I didn't
> see the benefit. If I didn't want an article, I'd delete it. If I
> downloaded an article, it was marked Read. Unread allowed me a nice
> middle ground to hold on to a message for later processing

That one was simplified out of existence in new-pan.  Charles decided the
complexity of the code wasn't worth it for the few users that would
actually seriously miss the feature, and I pretty much agree altho I did
find the feature useful myself.  As you, I normally kept things marked as
unread to reply to later, in my text groups.

I now use different strategies in my text and binary groups.  In my text
groups, I can easily tell new vs old but re-marked unread based on the
cached icon, as I download "to order", not ahead.  (Unfortunately, while
it's possible to filter the display on that, the filter is the reverse of
what it would take to only show new posts.)

In my binary instance, as mentioned above, I pre-download to (a much
larger) cache, then delete the headers once I'm done with them, so
anything that still shows up isn't yet processed.

-- 
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