Re: [Pan-users] Pan not working

[Duncan]

Dieter Britz posted on Sun, 1 Jan 2023 15:07:56 +0100 as excerpted:

> I have used Pan for years on my Ubuntu and Kubuntu laptops,
> but from a few months ago it stopped working - no newsgroups.
> If I subscribe to one, it seems to enter it in the list of groups but
> when I click on it, nothing happens, see the screenshot.
> 
> I use eternal-september.org as the news server and am a subscriber - it
> all worked fine before until it died.
> 
> What can be going on here? How do I get back on?

So based on the screenshot, the newsgroups are still listed, but all under 
"other groups", none subscribed.  And from your description, attempting to 
subscribe a group seems to do so (presumably it's listed under subscribed 
groups for that session), but clicking on it does nothing, and ... 
implied ... quitting and restarting pan eliminates it from the subscribed 
groups list, again putting it under other groups.  Accurate description?

That sounds very much like a corrupted file, likely either the newsrc file 
(if there's more than one, servers.xml contains a server to newsrc map 
among its other settings) or newsgroups.xov.  These and other pan files 
are normally found in pan's data dir, which is IIRC ~/.pan2 by default (if 
the $PAN_HOME environmental var isn't set, which it has been for it must 
be nearing two decades here, thus the "IIRC" qualifier).

Before you start with pan's config it's a good idea to run (in a terminal) 
a smartctl -AH on the drive containing that dir as well as an an fsck on 
the partition, to ensure the drive and filesystem are in good health.

Assuming that doesn't find bigger problems, if you don't care about losing 
pan's config, state and cache, you can of course just delete the entire 
dir and reconfigure from scratch, and the problem will likely be gone.

But I never want to lose all that, plus I always want to figure out as far 
as possible what went wrong so as to be better prepared if it happens 
again, so I'd be more likely to back up the dir and delete/restore files/
subdirs (with pan shut down each time I change what's there so it doesn't 
rewrite corrupt data) until I find the file that's causing the problem.  
Then I'll examine the file in a text editor (pan's config is text-based) 
to see if I can tell what happened and possibly delete or edit only the 
bad part, keeping in mind of course that I already made a backup that's 
easy enough to restore and try again if I screw something up.

-- 
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