[Pan-users] ANN: Pan 0.12.0 "Handle all such BTs and clusters by blowing them off"

[Charles Kerr]

Pan 0.12.0, "Handle all such BTs and clusters by blowing them off",
has been released.  It can be found at http://pan.rebelbase.com/.
 
What is Pan?

        Pan is a newsreader, loosely based on Agent and Gravity, which
        attempts to be pleasant to use for new and advanced users alike.
        It has all the typical features found in newsreaders and also supports
        yEnc, offline newsreading, article filtering, multiple connections,
        and a number of extra features for power users and alt.binaries fans.

        It's also the only Unix newsreader to get a perfect score on the
        Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval evaluations.  See
        http://pan.rebelbase.com/features/ for the rest of the
        sales pitch.

About 0.12.0

        This is the first non-beta release in two months.  In that time Pan has
        been ported to gtk2, added font and charset handling in reading and
        posting, improved offline reading, added many usability improvements,
        dropped most library prerequisites, about 15 bugs from the last stable
        release, and had five beta releases to shake out any new bugs.

Changes Since 0.11.3

    CONFIGURATION

        * Reduced minimum requirements to gtk2 and libxml2, for people
          running systems without GNOME or KDE.

    NEW FEATURES

        * Better Internationalization: Pan can now finally display messages
          and headers in their appropriate charsets and fonts (#53465, #79275)
          as well as post messages in user-specified charsets (#65161).

        * Added menu button "File|Work Offline" for toggling on/offline.

        * Added menu button "File|Delete Last Task" (the "oops" button ;)

        * Added new preferences option to get new headers, or new headers and
          bodies, from subscribed groups automatically when starting Pan.

        * Added support for message/partial mime content headers.
          Thanks to T. Gamble for requesting this. (#80715)

    UPDATES

        * Decoding attachments is much faster and uses less overhead.

        * Usability improvements in
          space reading (#81868),
          copying articles to folders (#64867),
          watching/ignoring articles (#78006),
          the `next article' button (#82724),
          reading a group for the first time (#82092),
          underlining URLs (#65511),
          displaying attachments (#67554),
          saving attachments (#75591, #79338),
          colors in the compose window (#80470, #75999),
          logging error messages for failed posts (#69390),
          and rot13'ing selected text (#72015).

        * menu cleanups for GNOME Human Interface Guidelines compliance.

        * New filter dialog: The article filter GUI has been changed so that
          it can all be driven from keyboard accelerators, so that several
          changes can be made at once for a single refiltering, and so that
          subject/author filters can be kept as the user changes from one
          group to another.

        * Minor speed improvements in startup, article reading, threading,
          and sorting.

    BUG FIXES (sorted by age)

        * Fixed minor 0.11.3 memory leaks.

        * Fixed 0.11.3 bug that didn't allow i18n characters in users'
          From: headers in new posts. (#80177)

        * Fixed 0.11.2.90 bug that failed to deccode yEnc-encoded text
          messages (such as .nfo files) properly when the user tried to
          read them inside Pan's text pane.  Thanks to William McBrine for
          reporting this bug. (#75136)

        * Fixed 0.11.2.90 bug that caused Pan to crash when showing a
          warning dialog before posting a user's article. (#76350)

        * Fixed 0.11.2 bug that didn't show HTML messages.  We still don't
          parse the HTML -- HTML has no place in Usenet -- but we at least
          show the message now.  Thanks to Himanshu J. Gohel for reporting
          this bug.  (#78723)

        * Fixed 0.11.2 bug that let the article cache grow too large.
          Thanks to Bernard Debreil for reporting this bug. (#81464)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that didn' properly decode all
          quoted-printable encoded headers.  Thanks to Martin Tomasek
          for reporting this bug. (#84987)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that failed to handle x-unknown
          charsets correctly.  Thanks to Martin Tomasek for reporting
          this bug. (#85082)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that didn't properly thread articles
          that had the subject header idiom "track (n/M] part (x/y)".
          Thanks to gaw zay for reporting this bug. (#80901)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that could cause Pan to crash when adding
          new tasks while the task manager dialog was open.  Thanks to
          Thomas Gamble for reporting this bug. (#82262)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that could cause Pan to crash when deleting
          articles which had crossposts in a group that was being unloaded by
          Pan.  Thanks to bickingd for reporting this bug. (#82865)

        * Fixed long-standing crash when rewrapping text in the
          compose window (#81258).

        * Fixed long-standing bug that caused Pan to segfault on shutdown
          when it could not write the threads.txt file in the data directory.
          Thanks to Corey Rogers for reporting this bug. (#81080)

        * Fixed long-standing crash when switching profiles in the compose 
          window. Thanks to Gianpaolo Racca for reporting this bug. (#79839)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that caused Pan to crash sometimes 
          when the log view window was open. (#65617)

        * Fixed long-standing bug that could cause Pan to crash if the
          grouplist file was corrupt.  Thanks to Adam M for reporting
          this bug. (#72435)