Re: [Pan-users] New Windows installer

[Alan Taylor]

On 15 March 2016 at 09:34, Steve Davies <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> With all of the recent activity I thought it only fair that I should
> assemble a new Win32 installer build. It is at the usual location:
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/paninstall/
>
> It runs for me here but is not heavily tested as I am not a big NNTP user
> anymore. My attempts in 2014 were a bit crashy, so I've attempted a more
> pure GIT compile this time.
>
> Let me know your results here.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve
>
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>

I have installed this latest Windows version and here are my results:
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit, version 1511, OS build 10586.164, Intel Core2
Duo E7500 @ 2.93GHz, 6GB ram
I uninstalled a previous version of Pan using the Windows uninstall
process.  A new install would look OK, but when I actually try to run
the program Pan kept failing with the message :"This application has
requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way"

The fix/solution is to delete the existing C:/users/USERid/.pan2
directory before trying to install, because (I guess) the uninstaller
doesn't delete it and its presence somehow messes up the new install.
After deleting that directory Pan will install and run.

I think I had to reboot before my ISP would recognize Pan, otherwise I
got a "authentication required" error.  Authentication is *not*
required on my fibre-to-the-home setup.

Then pan runs fine, until the article-cache fills up.  This is a
problem I have had with previous versions, I don't recall how
many-seems like all of them for the past 5(?) or more years.

I download a lot of binaries, some quite large, so even with a 100 MB
article-cache it does fill up.  When it does fill up, instead of
stopping, or erroring, Pan keeps on downloading, but only getting
fragments of some of the attachments.  When I stop Pan, the
article-cache is cleared by the program (because I have that option
set) and then runs again OK until the article-cache fills again.  For
example, downloading a binary with 50 MB attachments eventually fails.
You might think it with a 100 MB cache it would fail on the third file
but no, it runs for a while, for quite a few files, before failing.

I have increased my article-cache to 1000 MB and am running that now,
but I think that also will eventually fill up.  I suppose the fix is
that Pan should watch the free space in the article-cache and clear
out unneeded items when space is short, or clear unneeded items as
soon as they are saved to disk.  (I don't know how the article-cache
is used so I don't know when an article is no longer needed.  Seems to
me it would be unneeded when saved to disk.  Or if the idea is to keep
as many as possible for re-use, then Pan could issue a warning and
pause, not silently fail.)

Thanks for the updated version.  I'm sure all the other fixes are
helpful to Windows users.