[Pan-users] Update on cron-friendly Pan

[Charles Kerr]

I did a little exploratory hacking last night on making Pan cron'able.
It looks like we've done a good job of decoupling Pan's backend and GUI:
in 15 minutes I was able to get a gui-free version Pan start up and process
tasks.xml. :)

So, where do we want to go with this?

* If the goal is to just have Pan run tasks silently and exit,
  then all that remains is to convince Pan to exit when the queue
  is empty in console mode.

* Having the status messages from the bottom of the main window
  (showing percentages of a task completed, for example), a la wget,
  is also do'able, but more work and maybe not desirable in cron.

* A middle-ground approach that I like, which gives user feedback
  but also plays well in a cron environment, would be to have Pan
  write all the log messages (ie, everything the GUI puts in the
  log window) into a log file ($PAN_HOME/log.txt?).

cheers,
Charles