[Pan-users] Re: So, what's left before 1.0?

[Duncan]

walt posted on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:54:03 +0000 as excerpted:

> Given what I've read about the alpha quality of the kde4 'releases' I

Grrr!!  I'm a kde guy and kde4 is only /now/, with 4.3, getting to the 
late beta stage, where I'd even /begin/ to consider it usable, and I 
should know, as I run pre-releases, betas, etc, all the time.  Worst of 
all tho is that they're not only telling people it's usable for most 
people now (yes, even with broken certificate handling, people with 
broken online banking, etc... apparently "normal" people don't need 
properly functional SSL/HTTPS/etc, by KDE's definition), but they've 
abandoned the last fully working version, 3.5, to the point there's 
serious questions on whether there will be security updates and the like.

(And that's the severely abbreviated as off topic version.)

> don't know if this even deserves a mention. (But you can tell I'm going
> to mention it anyway ;o)
> 
> I think there is a very long-standing bug in the way that pan marks
> articles as read/unread, but I don't know how to reproduce it.
> 
> I've seen it only in multipart-binary groups with tons of headers, not
> in groups like this one.
> 
> My gut feeling is that it has something to do with syncing articles
> between multiple servers, maybe(?) something to do with old articles
> expiring on different servers on different days?  It must be something
> fairly quirky because it doesn't happen every time.  I wish I could give
> you a test case, but I can't.

I've seen this too.  In fact, I believe it's why several newsgroups on 
gmane are showing up "dead" for me -- I've never gotten a single post 
from them.

In particular, I had been a long-term subscriber to 
gmane.linux.gentoo.devel when the gentoo-project list was formed, and  
gmane.linux.gentoo.project was setup on gmane, exporting it as a 
newsgroup, as they do.

Due apparently to a number of cross-posted articles appearing in 
g.l.g.devel before I subscribed to g.l.g.project, when I did subscribe, 
pan refused to pull headers/overviews for project AT ALL.

With an entirely different pan instance, one setup using PAN_HOME pointed 
at a different directory, that thus never knew anything about my 
g.l.g.devel subscription, I could pull g.l.g.project just fine.  So the 
articles are there on gmane.  Pan just refuses to pull them in my main/
text pan instance, due to the cross-posting.

Here's what it looks like to me, after examining some of the cross-posts 
and the data for those two groups in pan's newsrc file for gmane.  I've 
not looked at pan's code to see if it even makes sense, but this is what 
it looks like:  Pan apparently confuses the xref lines, recording the 
message sequence numbers for .devel under .project as well.  Since .devel 
is a far more mature list/newsgroup, it has far higher sequence numbers.  
The result is that pan is /convinced/ it has seen and long since deleted 
all the .project posts to date and probably for the next half decade!  
Effectively, it thinks the server just got restored from a half-decade-
old backup!  As such, it's refusing to show the posts.

Now, I could probably fix the data locally by deleting BOTH the records 
for .devel AND .project.  But I have years of archived .devel posts, and 
deleting them to fix .project isn't an option.  So I suffer...

Anyway, I've wanted to file this bug for years, but couldn't quite 
describe it well enough to get anything worth filing.  I think I 
understand it a bit better now, and perhaps could, but haven't had a 
chance to actually test my theory yet, thus, no filed bug.  Plus, with 
pan development stalled, there was no urgency.  Now there is.

-- 
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