[Pan-users] Re: New install not finding existing configuration

[Duncan]

Fred Fraley <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 11 Oct 2006
13:46:33 -0400:

> Just installed the new Mandriva release and it installed Pan 0.112. When
> it opens it is asking for server information.  I have been using Pan for
> several years and never don't recall having to do this before, IIRC the
> new versions found the existing /.pan and proceeded from there.  Now I see
> /.pan and /.pan2, which was empty.  I do not see any entry for Pan in
> /.gnome.
> 
> Is there some way I can direct it to the existing configuration?  If I
> enter server information, will it pick up the group lists, article counts,
> etc?  Or will I overwrite and lose everything?  I tried copying the
> contents for /.pan to /.pan2 but it did not seem to help.

The separate directories are because many of the formats have changed, and
to allow you to keep both versions installed in parallel if you wish, for
a time.  pan itself is dramatically different from the 0.14.x you were
used to, now, as you'll find out over time using it.

Of the configuration files you can reuse, with or without some
modification, are the score file and the newrc files, which pan now uses
as its default group tracking format.  

The score file may need some modification, depending on how you had noted
newsgroups in the old one.  If you used regex for the newsgroups in the
old one, you'll have to convert them to normal * wildcards -- nearly
everything but * is now taken as a literal match in the newsgroups field. 
However, if you are like me, you can take the opportunity to straighten up
and simplify the entries.  Instead of nearly a hundred rules as before, I
now have six (compound) rules, in two sections.  The Score file is now
much more strictly slrn style, with only the case insensitivity borrowed
from xnews.  Thus, reference the first link below almost exclusively, with
the case stuff from the second one being the major exception.

http://www.slrn.org/docs/score.txt
http://xnews.remarqs.net/scoring.txt

AFAIK, the only differences in the newsrc files is the names, as that's a
common format. After reinstalling old-pan (0.14.x), export newsrc files,
one for each configured server.  You can then replace the ones in the new
server layout as appropriate, with the ones exported from old-pan.

BTW, pan 1.0 is getting pretty close now, and there have been a number of
bug fixes in the latest (basically) weekly build, now pan 0.116, since
0.112 came out.  Some of those might have been backported to
Mandriva's 0.112, but not all of them will have made it.  Check pan's
homepage for a fresh package, or build from source tarball.  Back when I
was on Mandrake (I'm now a Gentoo user), I often used the Red Hat (now
Fedora) RPMs.

There are three big changes in new-pan.  First, it scales MUCH better on
large (>100k messages) groups.  Second, pan now has a unified view of all
the servers you configure, instead of displaying each one separately. 
Third and more of interest to developers except that it makes tracking and
fixing bugs much easier, new-pan is implemented in C++ while old-pan was
C. There are many smaller changes you will find, but most of them are the
result of one of the first two above.  As you get your wits about you in
new-pan, you'll likely have a number of questions.  That's expected, and
what this list is for.  Of course, many have likely been already answered
if you check the archives, but you can ask again and someone will likely
answer.

-- 
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