Re: trn 4.0-test7*: messed up newsrc on server glitches

[Patrick V. <pat...@pe...>]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Nick Leverton wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 05:30:22PM +0100, Marco van Loon wrote:
> >
> > On infrequent/erratic occasions I've apparently had newsservers acting
> > a bit weird, resulting in things like the following in my newsrc(s):
> > alt.binaries.pictures.anime: 1-1075286495
> > alt.binaries.sounds.anime: 1-1075286495
>
> It's a pretty nasty bug, and I've almost switched away from trn on more
> than one occasion because of it.  Unfortunately if I have five thousand
> postings to read again, it's quicker to go through them and recover my
> pointers in trn than in any other newsreader.  Archiving my .newsrc
> every night helps ...
>
> It seems to be to do with dropped connections or where the server closes
> the connection, but trn copes with the normal case, this is a rare
> exception (though often enough to be irritating!).  It happens every
> couple of months here.

I can only confirm this bug, and it indeed seems to happen when the server
(or the connection with the server), for one reason or another goes away
while trn is running. It then tries to get lots of empty articles, also
writes messages of this kind to the console, and when you close trn, it
usually sets the high watermark of lots of groups to some insanely high
number.

As far as I have been able to determine, this is not caused by the
newsserver returning strange/large message numbers...

It indeed only happens quite infrequently, but when it happens, it's very
bothersome to recover from...

Best regards,

Patrick.
(Still a quite happy trn user, since there's nothing better to be gotten
for reading news..)