David Chmelik posted on Fri, 11 Jul 2025 10:49:56 -0700 as excerpted: > On 7/11/25 12:58 AM, Dominique Dumont via Pan-users wrote: >> On Friday, 11 July 2025 04:35:45 Central European Summer Time David >> Chmelik wrote: >>> I have Slackware GNU/Linux (64-bit n86) pan 0.163 which for some >>> days--a few/several sessions--no longer shows messages. This happened >>> before and someone said delete some ~/.pan2 stuff: what was that? >>> (have no access to that thread of course)
>> Please check menu "View -> Layout" and make sure that "Show Body Pane" >> is selected. > Of course it is; only messages don't display, not the entire (visible) > body pane. Turns out your description is ambiguous, with DD reading it one way, apparently mistakenly, while I read it a bit differently. Or actually, I see at least two additional ways it can be read. Maybe one, and its corresponding config-fix, will be correct... 1) What I originally thought because I had it happen to me once... The messages are no longer showing up in the overview pane (aka headers pane, which I contend is a misnomer since technically it only shows the headers that are in the overview, not full headers since you only get them once you download the message, after which they can be displayed in the body pane using the show all headers toggle), so you can't click them to show them in the body pane. In my case it was because I had set match only my articles (with only matching articles shown) and quit pan, forgetting about it. Since I had already posted and downloaded my followups for that session, when I reopened pan and set it to download articles in subscribed groups, I could see it doing so but then saw no new articles as there weren't any more of mine that matched the setting I had forgotten about. It took me longer than it should have (several days in fact) to figure /that/ one out, but once was enough -- I've never repeated that mistake! =:^) (And also... this is why I always prefer to find what the actual problem is and solve it, if necessary by bisecting the ideally text config file by file and then line by line, because if I don't, it can happen again and I'll /still/ not have a solution better than blowing away the entire config or at least the entire file of that config, whereas if I bisect down to the problem line, even if I can't fix it in the GUI I can go straight to the problem in the text file and fix that, if it does happen again.) Of course there are other config possibilities that would result in the same issue, like matching only watched articles and having no new ones show up. If this is what you're seeing, tho -- no new messages showing up -- then it's probably something along these lines and hopefully a perusal of the View, Header Pane settings should reveal the problem. 2) The other problem that I can think of matching a different read of your description would be a color settings misconfig, where foreground and background end up being the same color so the text is invisible. Given that white/bright backgrounds are extremely uncomfortable to me, I tend to use "reverse" aka "dark" color schemes, which tend to trigger "invisible text" bugs when the color code changes and either foreground defaults to dark/black or background to light/white, while the other is processed correctly leading to light-on-light or dark-on-dark, invisible either way. But the last pan bug I saw of that nature was fixed several releases ago (well before 0.163), so unless you're using an old distro version that happens to be the bugged release, that wouldn't be it. But particularly if you were messing with your color settings, or even if not and the symptoms match, check them. If neither of those is the problem... to try to answer the ~/.pan2 question generically by describing what the most critical files within it do... Pan's main app settings are in preferences.xml. If that's where you think the problem is, back up that file and (with pan closed) delete it. If that fixes it, you can try resetting from the backup and bisecting to the problem line, if you don't want to manually redo your settings. If the problem seems to be pan being "stuck" and unable to download (including new overviews/headers), I had that once due to a corrupted tasks.nzb file. That's only unfinished tasks so deleting it should only delete those, probably not worth hand editing unless you had something complex you were in the middle of and don't want to manually reschedule it all. Of course the man server settings are in servers.xml , with individual per-server group tracking in the newsrc files and newsgroups.xov . Actually, if your server(s) renumbered their articles or you tried to change servers by editing an existing server instead of adding a new one and deleting the old, those *are* common culprits, the newsrc and/or newsgroups.xov files. If the per-server and per-group numbers are out of sync one way (the new server's message numbers are way ahead of what pan has recorded), everything will look unread again, which is irritating but not as bad as the other direction (the new server message numbers are lower than what pan has recorded), where the numbers now correspond to what pan thinks it has already seen so considers them all read already! The other issue might be filesystem corruption with the files in article- cache. That's all the messages pan has "downloaded to cache". With the default cache size it won't be much (a single session's worth, perhaps) for binaries, but could be months worth for text groups. Or if somehow article-cache got marked read-only or set to a different user so pan can't cache anything... -- 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 [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
