Re: [Pan-users] Segfault at exit

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson posted on Sat, 24 Dec 2016 17:56:17 +0000 as excerpted:

>> And IIRC I had a problem with a corrupt tasks.nzb at one point, tho
>> that should be regularly updated, so I wouldn't expect it to be the
>> problem in this case as it has been an ongoing problem for you for some
>> time, and that was a more urgent "pan won't work at all" problem for
>> me, when it got corrupted.
> 
> Also good to know.  I don't tend to use nzb files, but if that's a
> standard behaviour, then that could well be something to look at.

Standard behavior indeed, as tasks.nzb is how pan stores downloads it 
hasn't completed yet when it shuts down.

One thing Charles did a good job on in the pan C++ rewrite is choosing to 
use established standard solutions whenever possible, even when it meant 
some extra work as it did with the newsrc files because they are only 
single-server and the Charles worked hard to make the pan rewrite 
transparent multi-server (and did a good job at it, if I do say so!)

And since he was adding nzb support already, I guess he decided to reuse 
that code to store unfinished tasks over a shutdown, as well.  Which is 
genius in a way, as the nzb code gets far more routine use on a far 
broader set of systems than it otherwise would, that way.

But it threw me for a loop when I had problems with it as well, because 
to my knowledge I wasn't doing anything with nzbs, and at the time I had 
no idea pan was actually using the file, so it was the /last/ thing I 
expected to be the problem.  Of course once I found out it was and I 
opened it and saw the corruption, I gained both a better understanding of 
how pan works, and a new appreciation for Charles' wisdom and genius in 
using an established standard in a way I certainly hadn't expected.

-- 
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