[Pan-users] Re: Import from Old Version

[Duncan]

Mike - EMAIL IGNORED
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 21 Jul
2007 14:55:37 -0400:

> Can I use the old 'folders' directory?

No, not directly, anyway.  Old-pan formerly stored messages in folders by 
sort of faking that it was a news server, only read from a local folder 
instead of remotely.  The pan rewrite has no code corresponding to the 
old-pan code that did that faking, so no.

In terms of what's actually on the disk, the raw messages themselves are 
in the same format as the cache is, raw format directly as downloaded, in 
data/messages/folders/foldername.  You can of course save those elsewhere 
if desired, but I know of no way to get them back into new-pan without a 
lot of manual work.

There are also the data/folders_unsub.dat and folders_unsub.idx files.  
I'm not sure if these are actually used by old-pan or simply written 
since the same code that handles real servers handles these, and writes 
the fake data out as if it was real.

To actually import these into new-pan, as with importing any arbitrary 
messages, you have a couple options.  The easiest is likely to be running 
a local news server, inn or leafnode or some such, and feeding the raw 
post files to it, then letting pan grab them from there. 

Alternatively, one could create a script that created the new-format 
files and essentially faked pan into believing this was info it had 
previously downloaded off a server that really isn't there, much as old 
pan did in its own code.  That's likely to be rather more difficult to do 
than it's worth, however.  I'm guessing it'd be far easier to feed the 
messages to a real news server (locally) and then let pan download them 
from the real server running on localhost as if it was downloading off 
the net.  Of course, that depends on how easy it is to feed such messages 
to the news server itself.

Finally, it might be possible to construct (using python or perl code and 
building on preexisting networking and news function libraries) a server 
that actually took these messages directly, and fed them out a (local) 
network port that pan could connect to.

...

Luckily for me, I discerned the potential dead-end problem with pan's 
faked server idea long before I ever heard of the rewrite.  Actually, 
IIRC I had pan eat some of my saved messages at one point several years 
ago and decided that wasn't the best way to go.  Anyway, text messages 
that I wanted to keep, I mailed to myself.  Binaries, I saved the 
binaries to disk and deleted the messages they came from.  So all that 
was in folders for me was sent messages.  That got lost, but new-pan 
doesn't save sent messages anyway (only as it redownloads them from the 
server as it would any other post), so oh, well.  The stuff I really 
wanted to save as I said, I had mailed to myself.  It's still in kmail, 
in standard mbox and maildir format folders there.  Those are standard 
format, so if I switch mailers or whatever, there are converters out 
there, if the new mailer doesn't read the standard formats on its own.

-- 
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