FWIW, current git pan, git commit in the headers, but from help/about, it's 80566c8.
Setup: As regulars here will likely know from my previous mentions, I maintain three separate pan profiles or instances, taking advantage of the fact that if pan finds PAN_HOME set to some directory in its environment when it starts, it will look for its config files, cache, etc, there, instead of using the (Unix) default $HOME/.pan2/ for its files. So I have a pan starter script with three symlinks, pan.text, pan.test and pan.bin, that (among other things) uses the name of the symlink it was started as to point pan at the appropriate data files for that profile. pan.text is for the text groups I follow and is the only profile I use at all regularly. These days, the only text "groups" I follow are those on news.gmane.org, which is a mailing list to newsgroup and web interface service and archive (see http://gmane.org for more on it), allowing me to follow various mailing lists including this one for pan as newsgroups, instead of mailing lists. However, now years ago, when my ISP still hosted newsgroups, I subscribed to several of the ISP-specific newsgroups there, and I actually still have them archived in my pan.text instance, in case I want to look back at some of the discussion or more likely, find the email address of some of the old users, assuming of course that it's still valid. Of course for both servers (the old ISP server set to a fake localhost address of 127.0.0.1, with connections set to zero, so it never tries to update and only actually updates the gmane server) I have expiration set to never-expire, so the headers stay around, and for my text profile, my cache size is set to several gigs, while last I checked, I had only 3/4 gig of actual messages in cache, so the cached messages stay around as well. The pan.test profile, meanwhile, is for the occasional fetching of some message someone mentions here, for troubleshooting, where I don't actually want to subscribe to the group in question, and for otherwise simply browsing groups I may or may not subscribe to, later. But if I subscribe to groups in the test profile, it's only for temporary convenience, as the intent is to keep the various newsrc and similar group tracking files as well as the cache deletable, thereby keeping this unimportant data from clogging my other two profiles, which I then use only for groups I am interested enough in to subscribe to longer term, never visiting unsubscribed groups in them. But I only use pan.test occasionally, either when I'm troubleshooting some pan problem as seen in a specific message, or for temporary browsing. I have its cache configured as several gig, unexpiring, as I'll often download some stuff from a few groups, then spend several days (or longer, as I may drop it for months at a time and only come back to finish the job much later). The third profile, pan.bin, is of course for my binaries subscriptions. I do have a ($50) 1 TB block account from astraweb, and every once in awhile, I'll be bored and go download some stuff. But honestly, I only actually do that a few times a year, sometimes only once a year or even less frequently, and while that block account is over two years old now, IIRC, I think I may have downloaded maybe 50 GiB. At current annual usage, or even doubling or tripling that, the 1 TB block should last me well over a decade, and may in fact be effectively a lifetime subscription, as I'm nearing 50 so there's a fair chance I've under 30 years worth of newsgroup activity left, and at current rates, that's about when I'd finally use up the 1 TB. This profile and servers too is set to several gigs cache, unexpiring, so I can download a bunch of stuff to cache, and sort thru it in the newsgroup at my leisure, which may well be months, even years, before I go fetch more. (Of course it doesn't hurt that astraweb, like many dedicated news providers, has retentions going back many years now and possibly unexpiring, as well, as retentions are still increasing. So it's not as if I'll miss out if I don't get it before it expires, as was the case on my old ISP server, for instance.) Problem: All of which leads to what I'm posting about. I haven't actually downloaded anything in any profile other than text in some months, maybe a year, and was bored a few days ago, so decided to go look at what I might have left to go thru on the testing and binary profiles, and clean it up, possibly to download some more if there's not too much and my interest lasts thru actually cleaning up what I already have. So I start my usual going thru the newsgroups, deleting messages I'm not interested in, saving attachments to appropriate locations if I am and then deleting those, etc. Only I noticed the message delete behavior was different than I remembered it. As I remember it, deleting messages would actually delete the messages from the message cache, as well. So once I was done cleaning up a group and searched the cache for message files containing a newsgroups header with the group I had just cleaned up, there wouldn't be many (if any) messages from that group, left. And once I was done with all groups, the cache would be almost empty, tho I think there were usually a few fragments around, often individual parts of multipart posts that I hadn't actually deleted in the newsgroup, hoping the rest of the parts would be there and I could save the whole thing when I checked again. If I had actually fully cleaned up all groups, tho, I could simply delete any stray messages still left in the article-cache dir, leaving it clean for my next download event. But now, deleting messages doesn't seem to actually delete them. They do get deleted from the header pane, and pan still has them tracked as seen so (presumably) won't show me the deleted messages again, unless I delete its tracking. But the cache stays the same size as best I can tell, and even after there's nothing else showing up in a group as cached, grepping the cache folder for that newsgroup name still give me the same number of hits as before I deleted the messages in pan. So either something's different, and pan isn't deleting the actual in- cache messages as it used to, or I'm mis-remembering, and pan never did actually delete the articles in the cache, and it was only my manual deletion of all files in the article-cache after I was thru cleaning up the groups before the next download session, that actually deleted anything from the article-cache itself. But the trouble is, it has likely been a year, maybe more, since I actually downloaded anything, and while I'm sure I remember pan behaving as I described, deleting files from cache as I deleted the messages in the GUI, maybe I'm remembering old C pan's behavior, and the C++ rewrite, now rather old itself, has never actually worked that way at all. Questions: So now the question. Has anyone else noticed this change in behavior? Can anyone else confirm whether older C++ pan, say 0.130 or whatever, deleted the message files in the cache when the headers were deleted in the GUI headers pane? If C++ pan deleted files from the cache from its beginning, 0.90, and doesn't, now, 0.140 (actually live-git after 0.139's release), when did that behavior change? Maybe it's a bug, either introduced fairly recently, likely after 0.139's release, or gcc5 related despite the fact that I'm building with -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0, since if my memory is correct, it worked fine a year or whenever ago, and I'd have been using gcc4.something then. So is anyone building pan from current git using gcc4, and does current git pan still delete messages from the cache when they're deleted in the gui when built with gcc4? (If it matters, since I'm posting this message via pan, to gmane, the exact git commit I built from should be in the headers, but pan's help/about also lists it, as git 80566c8 .) Indeed, I'm /almost/ sure it /was/ working a year or whenever ago, as one group I had visited was mostly cleaned up, only 80 cached message files as hits when I searched for that newsgroup name in the headers, which is how I know deleting the last few didn't change a thing, as it's STILL giving me 80 file hits. I'm reasonably sure I had downloaded way more than 80 messages originally, so the rest of them must have been cleaned up when I deleted the obvious spam and of no particular interest to me messages back then. Meanwhile, I'm aware that many users simply use the default cache size or use a much smaller cache, and let pan manage it automatically, often not downloading to cache at all, but rather, downloading and saving files directly, so they don't need a multi-gig cache to browse the pre- downloaded messages from once they're all locally cached, as I generally do. Obviously, these folks aren't likely to care one way or the other, since their cache is small enough pan rotates individual messages in and out multiple times over in a single download. So am I the only one doing download to cache, and going thru messages (not already saved attachments) once they're downloaded, and thus the only one who actually cares about pan's behavior when a message is deleted in the GUI, because for everyone else, the message will likely be overwritten in cache within minutes, anyway? If there are others who care about this, /should/ pan delete the messages from cache once they're deleted from the GUI? Does it even matter to anyone else? -- 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 https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
