[Pan-users] Re: How to get messages vissible

[Duncan]

Julien Michielsen
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 23 Sep 2008
11:15:49 +0200:

> Long time ago I got pan working, and thought it was a great news-reading
> tool. However, it doesn't work any more as it did. After starting it up
> (pan-0.132-120.1) 

You don't say how long ago you had pan working, or what version it was, 
but from the (snipped) mention of ~/.pan, it would appear to be what is 
now generally referred to as "old-pan" (versions thru 0.14.x), while you 
are now using "new-pan" (versions starting with 0.90, with 0.133 being 
the latest, your 0.132 thus being slightly behind).

You are correct, it does /not/ work any more like it did.  It works 
somewhat differently now.  It'll take a bit of getting used to, but 
particularly if you do large binary groups and/or use multiple servers, 
the new version is likely to work far better for you, once you get used 
to it, of course.

As I implied, the directory ~/.pan (which can be a symlink as it is for 
you, mine was too, back then) is associated with old-pan.  New-pan uses 
an entirely different format for many of its files (it has to due to 
differences in the way it works now) and now uses ~/.pan2 by default, not 
the original ~/.pan.

You'll need to setup new pan from scratch, tho it seems you've started 
that process since you have a subscribed group listed.  Here, you'll 
begin to see the differences.  While old-pan managed each server 
independently, with new-pan there's no longer a concept of active server, 
as pan now combines the groups from all configured servers together, 
automatically tracking what groups are on what servers, and downloading 
messages from those groups, regardless of the server they appear on, as 
you update them.  This is why the interface changed to a large degree, 
and one of the reasons the file formats changed.  The other reason the 
file formats changed is that pan now manages memory more efficiently, and 
stores its data more efficiently as a result.  You wouldn't notice this 
in the UI, but you might well notice the difference in speed and memory 
required on large groups.  Previously, pan would bog down at a couple 
hundred thousand headers in a group, and became basically unworkable, 
regardless of your memory, as the number of headers approached a 
million.  Now, pan handles a million headers with ease, tho it does slow 
down as numbers approach 10 or 20 million.  Still, while it was a 
geometric slowdown before, it's far closer to linear, now, and given 
enough memory and a bit of time, it'll slog thru even tens of millions of 
headers without major issue.  And, of course now it does this all while 
coordinating multiple servers automatically, if you have multiple servers 
configured. =:^)

As for porting... you can probably use your scorefile from old-pan, tho 
it may take a bit of work to fix it up as new-pan is rather stricter slrn 
scorefile format.  If you had exported your old news lists into newsrc 
files, pan uses newsrc files natively in the new version, so you can make 
use of those (tho the newsrc format has no concept of multiple servers, 
AFAIK, and you have to setup each one by hand to match what new-pan is 
looking for for that server, see the servers.xml file in as I said, 
~/.pan2, for that bit).  If you had a large cache you wanted to save, 
those files too should be the same, altho if you used the default cache 
size, it's probably not worth the trouble. (To set other than the default 
10 MB cache size in new-pan, you must edit the appropriate line in 
preferences.xml, as Charles decided that setting was too "advanced" to 
confuse ordinary users with so it's no longer in the GUI.)

The rest of what you posted, the description of the main menu bar and the 
three panes, groups (with subscribed groups, other groups...), headers 
(listing author, subject, date, etc in a threaded view), and body (with 
subject, from, date, etc at the top, displaying the post if selected 
underneath), seems correct.  Assuming you've configured a server and 
pulled down a group list, as you apparently have since you have a 
subscribed group listed, you can expand the other groups listing, select 
a group, right click on it (or use the main menu entry) and subscribe.  
Depending on whether you have preferences set to fetch headers 
(overviews) automatically when entering a group or not, you may have to 
fetch them to get a list in the headers pane.  Once you get such a list, 
clicking on an individual post should download it and show it in the body 
pane.

Hopefully that gets you started.  It appears your main problem was 
confusion because you didn't realize the directory and formats had 
changed and you had to set pan up again.  If the above isn't not enough, 
let us know how far you've gotten and hopefully we can help further.

BTW, version 0.132 had a security issue.  0.133 has it fixed, but isn't 
so widely available.  Depending on where you got your 0.132 (presumably 
your distribution), it may or may not have the patch applied as well.  
You may want to review the changelogs to see.  Other than that, the other 
main patches between 0.132 and 0.133 were to modernize it to support 
newer gcc and glib, which should be a distribution issue only unless 
you're compiling your own, but there were a couple other minor bugfixes 
as well.  So if you have a security-patched 0.132, I wouldn't worry too 
much about 0.133.  If you don't see anything related to a security fix in 
the distribution's changelog, then it might be worthwhile asking them 
about it.  Here's the GNOME bug on it if you need more info:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535413

-- 
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