Re: [Pan-users] output from Status log, during header downloading..

[Charles Kerr]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 03:32:58PM -0700, Duncan wrote:
> On Wed 23 Apr 2003 13:53, Christophe Lambin posted as excerpted below:
> > On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 06:26, address@hidden wrote:
> > > Mon, 21 Apr 2003 23:20:06 - (Null) - file file-headers.c: line 128 func
> > > file_headers_load_group: assertion `group->_articles==NULL' failed,
> > > please report bug to address@hidden
> >
> > This is now fixed in CVS.  Thanks for the report.
> 
> How about a brief "power user" explanation of what the problem was?  "Fixed 
> in 
> CVS" is nice, but doesn't explain what was happening to cause the error in 
> the first place, or what you did to fix it.  Some of us not quite full C 
> programmer level power user folks like tracking that sort of thing, 
> especially when we saw the error in our logs, but it wasn't obvious what 
> effect it had, only the error indicated SOMETHING was wrong.  It's just human 
> nature to be curious WHAT.
> 
> Anyway..  Thanks for fixing it, tho.. even if we don't really know what "it" 
> was.  <g>

In the `get new headers' task, before getting the headers, Pan gets the low and
high article numbers from the group and removes local articles outside those
ranges.  This is how old articles fall off the end of Pan.

Previous versions removed the outliers after adding and displaying the new
headers.  I recently changed this to remove the outliers before new headers
are fetched from the server.  This was for a couple of reasons:

(1) header pane will have fewer items when the "add" event comes in,
    which should make the insertions faster
(2) Pan doesn't mislead the user by showing outliers in the header pane
    while new headers are being downloaded.  This is more significant
    on dialups.
(3) separating "remove outliers" and "add new" actions by the time it takes
    to download new headers is a convenient bandaid for an obscure timing
    issue detailed in #109498.  I'm still mulling over how better to decouple
    Article/Group objects from the header pane to fix #109498 at the design
    level.

The bug was that I move the "remove outliers" call _before_ loading the
headers from disk, so the remove failed, and Pan complained that we were
trying to handle articles when they hadn't been loaded, or something of
that nature.

cheers,
Charles