Re: [Pan-users] Gray threading background for one particular newsgroup.

[Duncan]

Christian Dysthe posted on Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:19:08 -0500 as excerpted:

> Hi,
> 
> I am having a strange problem with Pan built from git (GTK 2). One one
> particular news group the threading indication/indentation is gray. On
> all other newsgroups it's white. I have tried to unsubscribe to this one
> newsgroup and then add it again, but I get the same result.
> 
> Here's a screen shot of the group that get gray background:
> 
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2vpfleqxs7y27t/Pan140-2.png
> 
> Here'a a screen shot of how all other news groups look:
> 
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/w829sjrkudffmuj/Pan140-1.png
> 
> Any idea why that one group get the gray background? Is this a setting
> somewhere that I am missing?

Heh, your color-scheme is /entirely/ different than mine.

This shot's a bit old (2013) but still representative.  Pan is on the 
middle monitor.  Note that it's a triple full-HD monitor stacked desktop 
for a full 1920x3240 px screenshot, full-size, so you'll probably need a 
scaling viewer to see the full thing at once, then scale to 100% to see 
it at full-size and scroll around, tho even "full size" won't do it 
justice unless you're running 42-inch TVs as monitors as I am (for the 
bottom two, anyway).

http://wstaw.org/m/2013/05/11/duncan-fullscreen.png


Tho I've switched pan's groups and body panes so groups is on the left 
now, and I got new contacts and reduced the font sizes somewhat.

Anyway...

That is indeed a rather strange problem.  Given my dark-background color 
prefs I've had my share of strange color issues on pan and elsewhere, but 
I don't recall seeing anything like that, certainly not for one group 
only.

Based on the above you are already building pan against gtk2, which would 
be my first recommendation, since pan built against gtk3 mostly works, 
but people do report strange issues with it reasonably frequently, that 
go away when they build pan against gtk2, and the gtk3 port simply 
doesn't get the testing or wide deployment of gtk2, so... But you're 
already building against gtk2, so that can't be it.

Tho it wouldn't hurt verifying that.  Run ldd pan in a terminal window, 
and check that it's not loading any gtk3 stuff.  As I don't even have gtk3 
on my box, it can't load it here, but verifying that it's only doing gtk2 
on a box with gtk3 can't hurt.  In particular, my libgtk and libgdk lines 
look like this (gentoo ~amd64 box, hex numbers omitted):

libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /lib64/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /lib64/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /lib64/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0

FWIW, my gtk/gdk-pixbuf/cairo versions are as follows (the -r3 on cairo 
is a gentoo-specific revision number indication):

gdk-pixbuf-2.30.8
gtk+-2.24.24
cairo-1.12.16-r3

The other possibility is that it's a color issue.  You don't happen to 
have any scoring set that might apply to all articles in that group, do 
you?  You can try fiddling with pan color prefs a bit, both for scores 
and for "other text", and see if that affects it.  But I don't see how it 
could for just that group, /unless/ it was related to a score you had set 
that happens to affect everything in that group and little or nothing 
else, but score colors normally only affect the score column, so that 
shouldn't be it either.

The only really group-specific settings are visible in group 
preferences.  There's color, which normally only affects the group pane 
so shouldn't have any effect on the headers pane, and charset.

Charset!  That might actually be it!  Might there be some post in that 
group with a strange charset used in either the subject or author 
header?  Since the threading indention is in the subject column, that 
would be the strongest candidate.  If there's some exotic charset used in 
a subject header, it's just possible that gtk's processing of it triggers 
a rendering bug that results in the off-color seen in whatever pan or gtk 
is using for the header spacing.  If pan's using an exotic space 
character as it's threading spacer, as it might be...  Admittedly that's 
reaching a bit for an explanation, but it's the best one I can think of 
that fits the evidence we have so far.

If the group was unaffected until a certain date, and now it's doing 
this, you might check the posts around that date...

You can also try:

1) With pan not running, move pan's data dir elsewhere temporarily, and 
restart pan with a clean config and no groups loaded.  Fill in your 
server info and visit just that group.  Pan won't have a record for it so 
will prompt to download headers.  Try getting just the last say two 
headers, then tell it to get say 10, etc, until you can see at least one 
threaded header.  Does it show up then?  If not, try getting a few days/
weeks worth of headers and see if it shows up.  Then try downloading 
headers back as far as you had them in your normal config (assuming your 
server has enough retention for that, of course).  Does it then show up?

The idea being to see if it's in a clean config, and if the headers of 
some message trigger the problem.

2) Try the same thing, but start with a fresh full user config, either 
configuring a new login user for the test, or temporarily moving your 
entire user config to backup so it starts with an entirely clean user 
config.

Of course the idea here is to see if it's something in your user config, 
by starting with an entirely clean one.


That should give us some data on where the problem is, anyway.  If it's 
happening with a clean user config, then it's something either at the 
distro level or upstream.  If it's not happening there, but it's 
happening with a clean pan config, then it's gotta be something in your 
user config.  If it's not happening with a clean pan config on your 
existing user, but starts happening when you download a bunch of headers 
for that group, then it's gotta be something in those headers triggering 
it, tho the problem's probably at the distro or upstream level.  If it's 
not happening in a clean pan config and doesn't start happening when you 
download all the headers that you had in the group before, then it's 
gotta be something in the pan config, unless of course you couldn't get 
all the headers you had before due to server retention policies for that 
group, in which case it could still be something in the message headers.

-- 
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