Joe Zeff posted on Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:09:00 -0400 as excerpted: > On 08/05/2010 04:49 PM, Duncan wrote: >> That could be it. > > And then again... > > As I started to read each group, Pan marked all of the old posts read, > leaving me with nothing but the newest ones. Interesting. Last time, > when I didn't check the newsrc file, it didn't do that, just expected me > to read them. Now, it's marking them read as I enter the group. OK, I > can live with that.
(Referring to the files as I type, I didn't have all this memorized, tho Charles might! =:^) Yeah. The (per-server) newsrc file(s) simply lists per-group xref sequence numbers (and whether the group is subscribed, etc). These are the ranges of posts it has seen and marked read, but they /only/ track subscribed and marked-read. *Most* of the the rest of the group data is in the groups subdir, in the files named after the individual groups. These contain pan's header cache, formatted in three parts as mentioned in the remarks at the top of the file. The first two parts are xref and authors shorthands. These substantially reduce string duplication and thus pan's memory usage, as well as file-size on-disk. The third part is a per-post per-header record of the overview data, message-id, subject, author (shorthanded if it's one of the most frequent posters, looks like the shorthand lists are 72 entries long), references line (if present), time, xref (shorthanded), two lines of attachment info. The other file of interest here is newsgroups.xov (xover, the overviews index file). This file consists of lines tracking per-group total article count, unread count, and per-group-per-server high-water-mark, which is the xref-sequence number of the highest visible (generally, newest) post on the server. The difference between the stored high-water-mark and the one pan gets when it checks with the server is the number of messages on that server that pan believes it doesn't know anything about yet. Keep in mind that it's only the newsrc files that are standardized. The rest are pan-specific format. You manually synced (when rsync failed) the newsrc files, which tracked the messages you'd read, but apparently, the newsgroups.xov file wasn't synced either, so when pan checked and saw a much higher high-water-mark on the server, it requested all the messages between its (old) stored high- water-mark and the current one it just got from the server. That's the header download. Once it compared those headers with the records in the newsrc files, however, which it does on entry to the group, it realized it already knew about them and that you'd already read them, so it then marked them read. But it's likely a good thing you did download them. If the groups subdir didn't sync either, as now seems likely, those headers/overviews wouldn't be listed there either, and had the newsgroups.xov file been synced, pan would have had not actual record of those headers as it would have believed it had already seen them (and that they'd simply expired or you deleted them), based on the high-water-mark from the newsgroups.xov file. If you expire the headers anyway, no big deal, unless you wanted to actually see them for some reason, but if you keep everything around unexpired, as I do, that would have been a gap in the archive, as I said, messages that from pan's viewpoint, you'd seen and then deleted. Meanwhile, I may have figured out why you're not getting a good sync. Near the bottom of the rsync manpage, there's a list of environmental vars it uses. In addition to the rsync-specific ones which don't look interesting to us, there's three more general ones, one (which it checks two vars for) of which DOES look interesting. According to the manpage, rsync (on the local/client side) looks for the USER or LOGNAME var, using this as the default username sent to rsyncd. If neither is set, it defaults to user "nobody". I suspect that however you're running rsync, both of these (USER would be most common) are either unset or not exported, so rsync isn't seeing them. User "nobody" is unlikely to have permissions to write to the pan parts of your homedir, so... I don't know what your user umask, the default perms mask, or your group setup. On high security systems, user's home group will be the same name as the username, a 1:1 correspondence, and default umasks will default to 0077, meaning group and world perms default to nothing. On moderate security systems, there'll be one or more "users" groups, with more than one login user per group, and umasks will default to 0027 or similar, world still gets no permissions but the group gets read/execute, just not write. by default. Low security systems often default to 0022, both group and world read/execute, not write. If user "nobody" is in the same primary group as your user, the medium security 0027 umask would give it read but not write access unless you'd changed the default permissions, or no access if it's not in the same group. With low security, it'd get read but not write access either way. -- 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
