Re: [Pan-users] Messed up .newsrc

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff posted on Wed, 08 Oct 2014 16:52:57 -0700 as excerpted:

> Recently, my newsfeed was taken over by a bigger operation.  They did a
> grand renumbering and ever since, Pan has marked everything in each
> group as being read as soon as I entered it.  I remember this happening
> once before, and that it was fixed by editing my newsrc file.  Alas, I
> don't remember what was needed.  Any suggestions will be welcome.

Easy enough.

FWIW you can google "newsrc format" (without the quotes) and get the
standard description.  That's what pan uses except that the newsrc format
assumes just one server while pan is multi-server, so pan has one newsrc
for each server (see the servers.xml file to see which goes to which, or
rename both the files and the pointers to them in servers.xml to reflect
the server names, as I actually did), and pan doesn't actually track
subscriptions via newsrc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=newsrc+format

The first hit (feeling lucky) is a good one, a description and case study
of the format, as found in a book, "The Art of Linux Programming", as it
happens, by the famous Open Source guru Eric S. Raymond.  Tho it actually
mentions pan as /not/ using the newsrc format at the time the book was
written, copyright 2003 if you click the home link.  But if pan wasn't
using newsrcs yet by that time (perhaps after he wrote that portion but
before the book was published), it must have started using it shortly
thereafter, as it has certainly been using it for /nearly/ that long.

(Watch the wrap if before I post I forget to do the save-draft, open-
draft, hit the unwrap button, manually fix the long links, /then/ post,
dance, that pan requires to get unsplit long links if wrapping is normally
enabled.  No need, I remembered, but I'll leave this here in case it's
a hint for someone wondering how to do that.)

http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_books/art_of_unix_programming/ch05s01_1.html

Each newsgroup that is found on that server is listed, one per line, in
alphabetical order here but I'm not sure if that's because pan sorts it or
if that's just the way the server delivered the list.

Normally, if you're subscribed, the group name is followed by a colon (:),
if not,an exclamation point (!).  However, with pan they'll all be
exclamation points because as I explained above pan tracks actual
subscriptions using a different method since it's multi-server.

Following the exclamation point and a space, for groups you've visited,
there's a series of number ranges, separated by commas.  These are the
server-specific per-group sequential article numbers of messages you've
seen (read) in that group.

Because these article numbers are sequential but server specific, if your
news server changes, the new one will probably be somewhere else in the
sequence, and either all articles will appear read (if its sequence
numbers are lower for that group), or many articles will appear unread (if
its sequence numbers are higher).

To reset an individual group, therefore, all you need to do is delete this
series of numbers for that group and save the file, of course with pan
closed so it doesn't overwrite your work when you /do/ close it.

But the faster way to do it if you're simply changing servers (or if your
server admin reset the numbers and started over for some reason), is to
delete the entire newsrc file.  You can then start pan and have it
download the group list once again, creating a fresh file in the process.

Normally that'd lose your subscriptions as well, since they're normally
stored in the same file.  But since pan tracks them separately and leaves
all the groups in the newsrc file as if they're not subscribed, that
shouldn't be a problem.  Simply deleting the old newsrc and downloading a
new group list should do it.  =:^)


Meanwhile, users who have kept the same server and subscribed lists for
years can, if they want, go in and tidy the number sequences up a bit. For
various reasons (cancels, span filtering, etc), there's often gaps in the
sequence numbering, and the per-group range listing can get quite long
over time.  For those so inclined, it's possible to delete most of the
individual numbers and rewrite the ranges to fill in the gaps, thus
shortening the strings substantially and at least in theory, decreasing
the work pan has to do to keep track of it all, and the memory it uses to
do so.  You may however want to keep the ranges as they are for the last
few days or a week or a month, just in case the gaps get filled in.  But
If you've been tracking the group for years, you can still do a lot of
tiding up of the ranges and shortening of strings even if you leave a
couple weeks of verbatim ranges, just in case.

-- 
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