[Pan-users] Re: Problems downloading binaries

[Duncan]

Orlok Nosferatu posted on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 07:14:30 +0000 as excerpted:

> I run Pan on Ubuntu (10.04.2 Lucid) and saw that as of March 11th I can
> not download binaries anymore. The number of posts I download dropped
> markedly. It seems I can only download replies to posts. It is not a
> problem of my newsprovider, as I can download the binaries using KNode.
> I upgraded my Pan version to 0.134, but I see my problem still persists.
> Next I quit Pan, moved the .pan2 directory, started Pan again, entered
> my account information, added my list of news groups, and still no joy.
> 
>  Does anyone have a suggestion for me?
> Orlok<span style='font-family:Verdana'><span
> style='font-size:12px'>Hi,<br />
> <br />

First suggestion, please turn off the HTML.  It may be you didn't know it 
was on, but you do now, so please turn it off.  (Some of us use pan and 
gmane.org's list2news service for this list.  I suppose you already know 
how bad html looks in pan, but turning html parsing on can be a security 
issue among other things, so...)

As to the problem...

Ron's suggestion to check permissions is a good one.  It might also be a 
full partition, if you have pan and knode saving to different locations.

If you visit a pictures group (like the wallpaper group shown in the 
screenshots on the pan homepage, they aren't /all/ pr0n!), pan will 
normally display image attachments directly.  Does it continue to do so?

Can you still download to cache, possibly saving from there, instead of 
using the download and save option directly?  (For big posts this will 
require a larger cache as pan's cache is only 10 MB by default, cache size 
must be set by direct preferences.xml text-edit.  But reasonably small 
posts, still-images as above or mp3s, should download to cache just fine 
with a 10 MB cache, as long as you don't do more than one or two at once.)

If you have access to nzb files, will the posts from them still download?

Based on what you said about the timing and since it wasn't during a full 
system upgrade, if it's not permissions or a partition full issue, I'd 
strongly suspect that an incompatible or buggy library update is causing 
the problem.  Do you perhaps have a record of what system updates you 
might have done at the time, that could have triggered the problem?

FWIW, libgmime (the package may be listed as libgmime or simply gmime) 
might be one possible culprit as it deals with attachment functionality 
specifically. Can you check and see when it might have been upgraded last?

If you can build pan without issues, that means that it thinks the 
dependencies are all there, and that pan runs indicates similar.  But 
perhaps something incompatible happened to the implementation in one of 
them.  (Building pan from sources would take care of some of ABI changes, 
but if it was an internal implementation change, not an externally visible 
change, that's different.)

You might wish to search ubuntu's bug database (launchpad??) and file a 
bug, if you don't find any open.

-- 
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