[Pan-users] Re: weird behavior

[Duncan]

John Lindsay <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 28 Feb 2009
07:24:25 -0500:

> I started up Pan( 0.132) this week after not using it for 2 weeks and
> had some rather strange behavior. I had only the group panel visible and
> the header and body panels tabbed. It took some time before Pan would
> 'hold' the 3 panels visible screen that I was familiar with. The only
> remaining issue is that the indicators that show whether the article is
> text or binary is totally missing. If I look at the header screen to the
> left of the word 'subject' I see a very thin grey line but I am unable
> to latch on to it to expand that section. To the left of the headers is
> a blank space of 2 or 3 character widths which I assume is where those
> indicators should be. Under view, headers, 'thread headers is checked',
> 'show matching articles' is checked, and all 'match scores' are checked
> except for the lat one of match score -9999. In the body pane everything
> is checked. So basically -- how do I get those indicators to reappear?
> The distro is Debian Lenny.

The icon columns aren't sizable (at least here) even when pan's working 
normally, and yes, the thin gray line is indicative of the column divider 
that would ordinarily be movable.  Pan includes its own icons, they 
aren't part of a shared object library or something, so they can't really 
go missing from the binary unless the file itself is corrupt, in which 
case you'd likely get a segfault trying to start it.  But, they could 
fail to be displayed due to library incompatibility issues.

I run Gentoo here, but there have been various reports from Debian and 
Ubuntu land of problems that sound like library incompatibility issues to 
me... only they've never really been traced down as such.  You can check 
the archives or wait for Debian/Ubuntu users to post with their 
experiences.  One detail related to an entirely different symptom, 
however, was that for certain Ubuntu versions, pan doesn't work right 
(takes a very long time sorting headers when updating and may be missing 
some) when run in GNOME, but DOES work on the same system if run in KDE/
XFCE/whatever.  That may be worth checking.

Question:  What have you upgraded in the intervening time, if anything, 
and was gtk/glib/gmime among them?  Also, what version of gmime do you 
have installed?  Version 2.4 is known incompatible, with only a partial 
patch at this time.

What was the source of your pan build?  Note that pan 0.133 was release 
on August 1, a year to the day after 0.132, but it was mostly updates to 
compile with newer gcc and against newer glib, etc.  THERE WAS A SECURITY 
UPDATE, HOWEVER, but the same patch merged upstream for 0.133 had been 
floating around since May, and Debian may already include it -- it does 
in newer versions but while "Lenny" probably says something about age to 
Debian folks, as I already said, I'm not one.

Anyway, you may wish to take a look at the pan site and see if there's a 
0.133 for your Debian, or grab the sources and build it yourself, since 
presumably doing so would build against your currently installed 
libraries, etc, thus hopefully killing whatever incompatibility you 
appear to be seeing.

It could also be a bad/corrupt configuration.  Pan's data is stored in 
~/.pan2 by default.  You may want to try renaming its data dir to 
something else to see if pan comes up normally then or not.  Of course, 
you'll either have to reconfigure it or move the old data set back, but 
testing without the old config is a useful way to see if it's your config 
that's screwed.

-- 
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