Re: [Pan-users] pan always crashing fast again

[Duncan]

dchmelik-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w posted on Sun, 4 Sep 2022 21:43:11 -0700
as excerpted:

> On 9/4/22 5:19 AM, Duncan wrote:
>> dchmelik-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w posted on Fri, 2 Sep 2022 19:37:53
>> -0700 as excerpted:
>>
>>> Like for past few years until earlier this year, pan always crashes
>>> fast again (on Slackware64 15+current GNU/Linux).
>>>
>>> Pan always says something like this before crashing: (pan:16759):
>>> Gtk-CRITICAL **: 19:23:47.724:
>>> IA__gtk_tree_view_column_set_fixed_width:
>>> assertion 'fixed_width > 0' failed
>> What version of pan [a]nd do you know or can you check whether
>> it's built against gtk2 or gtk3?

> GTK2 0.149

OK.  At this point, since you don't see a current gtk3 0.151 build, I'd 
really suggest building it yourself (against gtk3), since 0.147 started 
modernizing with a switched to gmime3, thereby getting quite buggy and 
unstable during the modernizing for a few versions (as I've said 0.151 
seems to be stable again now, IDR whether 0.150 was yet or not), while 
IIRC 0.146 code was so dated I was having problems even getting it to 
build (against gtk2 still) without patches toward the end, and when I did 
it was buggy.

Tho it's possible 0.150 (against gtk3) would be enough, if you can find a 
binary for it -- I'm not sure if it was stable yet or not.  But if you 
build it you might as well go for the latest 0.151 or even try building 
current git master.

As it turns out, pan was one of the select packages I learned to build 
myself (learning to build updated libraries where necessary in the 
process, after switching to the beta Mandrake Cooker and finding even it 
sometimes didn't have current libs), nearly 20 years ago now on Mandrake 
(I switched to Gentoo in early 2004, and IIRC my first post to the pan 
list, according to gmane, was 2002).  Of course that was the old C-based 
pan, before its rewrite to C++ and at first even against gtk(1), before 
the port to gtk2, and I was quite new to Linux at the time, but I 
demonstrated that while it could be a hassle with lib-update-dependency-
hell, it was quite possible even for a non-dev Linux newbie.


If you do get a gtk2 version going again, I suspect that warning listed 
above means your header pane columns are going to be screwed up as it 
looks to be the same one I remember dealing with every so often for years 
on gtk2.  If so, or if it's still screwed up when you get a gtk3 version 
going (I don't think gtk3 triggers it any more but not sure it can deal 
with the problem if it's still in the config from gtk2), load pan's 
preferences.xml file in a text editor (with pan closed and a backup of the 
file in case something goes wrong) and delete all the...

<int name='header-pane-*-column-width' value='*'/>

... lines.  Then restart pan and it should reset the widths.

FWIW, upgrades of something or other (I /think/ gtk2 itself, but am not 
sure) seemed to trigger that problem here.  I think what was happening is 
that some cache for the icons for the read/unread/cached/etc had to be 
regenerated with the new version, and pan was reading zero-width columns 
the first time it loaded after they upgraded because it tried to read them 
before the cache was regenerated.  It would then store those zero-width 
columns in preferences.xml so simple restarting wouldn't help -- one had 
to either edit/remove the lines from preferences.xml manually, or discover 
all the columns invisibly stacked on top of each other at the right edge 
and laboriously drag the separators one by one to create new column 
widths.  I did the laborious drag a time or two, then switched to editing 
the xml file, then finally setup a pan wrapper script that would patch all 
the width entries back to something sane if they were zeroed out, so then 
whenever I saw the screwed up columns all I had to do was quit and restart 
pan (via the wrapper script) and the script would patch the config back to 
sanity.  But I suspect you won't be doing many (any?) more gtk2 upgrades 
and just deleting the lines and letting pan set sane defaults is the 
quickest single-shot fix.

But that wasn't triggering crashes, only a screwed up header pane listing, 
so unless it's somehow triggering actual crashes for you, that's not going 
to be your big problem ATM, only one you might (still?) have after fixing 
your big problem first.

-- 
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