[Pan-users] Re: Switched servers, now new messages appear as read

[Duncan]

"Scott I. Remick" <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 03 Mar 2008
02:48:48 -0500:

> Here's what I tried:
> 
> 1) Unsubscribe from a group with lots of traffic 2) Close Pan
> 3) remove group file from ~/.pan2/groups/ 4) cleaned out
> ~/.pan2/article-cache/ 5) Start Pan
> 6) Re-subscribe to group, fetching last 3 days of articles.
> 
> They were still all read.
> 
> What am I missing?

The newsrc files, which track messages by xref (server specific) number.  
All the files in groups do is act as a threading and overview cache.

It's the newsrc files that actually track messages per server.

BTW, when you switched news servers, did you simply point the old pan 
server instance at the new server address, or did you setup an entirely 
new server instance in pan?  If you did the former, that's what the 
problem is, because the numbers used in the newsrc files are group and 
server specific.

If you setup a new server instance in pan, then you probably hit a 
variant of a known bug, more often manifest as a dud newly subscribed 
group (won't show anything even after getting overviews/headers, even 
with groups known to be active and carried on the server in question) on 
an older server, where some messages had been cross-posted from a group 
you had been reading previously.  Something about that crossposting 
causes pan to screwup and thing ALL the messages in the new group are 
read.  It's a frustrating bug to hit, but barring evidence to the 
contrary, I strongly suspect your problem was simply trying to use the 
same server setup over again for a new server, instead of starting a new 
server instance and setup.  If you reused an existing server setup, it's 
not a bug, but simply the way xref numbers work -- you can't carry them 
between servers without creating havoc!

-- 
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