John Aldrich <jmaldr...@yahoo.com> posted 200904241119.50922.jmaldr...@yahoo.com, excerpted below, on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:19:50 -0400:
> On Friday 24 April 2009, Gerald L wrote: >> >> Sounds like a permissions issue preventing Pan from writing to the >> .newsrc file. >> > Well, that's weird. I had created a .newsrc file, but it still didn't > work correctly, so I deleted the news servers and recreated them and it > seems to be working now. I even closed and reopened Pan and the > subscribed servers were there. :-) Pan doesn't use the generic .newsrc file (at least not unless you specifically arrange for it to, see below), but rather, one newsrc file for each server configured (newsrc files don't do multiple servers, apparently). When you configure a server, the data for that server, including the assigned server-N.newsrc path, are stored in the servers.xml file (which is along with all pan data, found in ~/.pan2/ by default). There is one particular detail, however, that has caused a number of folks to find their subscribed group, etc. data disappearing at pan shutdown, after they reorganized their filesystem layout, moving their home dir but without setting up a new pan config. The paths to each server's newsrc file as stored in servers.xml are apparently[1] NOT relative by default, but absolute. Thus, with your homedir rename, the config was now pointing to a location that most likely not only didn't exist, but that it couldn't create as the permissions on whatever level of parent dir (possibly up to / itself) DID exist wouldn't allow the creation of the appropriate subdirs as set in servers.xml. That meant pan could keep the config in memory, and for other files, could save them in the default location under ~/.pan2, but couldn't create the files or save the data that belonged in the newsrcs, as configured by no-longer- existing absolute path in the servers.xml file. When you blew away the servers config and recreated them, you naturally created new and correct entries in the servers.xml file, so it worked correctly once again. This also explains why I've never had this sort of problem, since while I'm a heavy customizer and may move things around from time to time, I also know where the paths were since I customized them too, and thus adjust them when I adjust anything else affecting them. [1] "apparently not relative". I long ago hand edited mine to rename my newsrc files to correspond to the servers they cover, since I use multiple servers and that helps me track which newsrc file belongs to each. As such, I really can't look and see what the default is any longer, but someone pointed this out when another poster was having this problem and it makes sense. -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
