Re: [Pan-users] Re: How's 0.112 working for you?

[Brian Pack]

On Saturday 16 September 2006 14:48, Duncan wrote:
> Brian Pack <address@hidden> posted
> address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 16 Sep
>
> 2006 14:04:59 -0400:
> > [Charles Kerr wrote...]
> >
> >>Not very many bugs were reported this week, and most of them were
> >>enhancement requests. Either 0.112 is working pretty well, or everyone's
> >>burned out from the weekly betas.
> >>
> >>If it's the former, then RC1 should be the next release IMO.
> >
> > It's been bugged before, but the not saving the group status and what
> > has or hasn't been read until the app has closed is driving me batty.
> >
> > I've gotten to the point where I simply cannot trust Pan to properly
> > save it's status over an extended session.
> >
> > I will download new headers, and immediately close Pan. Restart and read
> > a few groups, then close. Restart then read a few more. Rinse, repeat.
> >
> > If I know I'm going to go back and read a group later, I absolutely
> > *must* close Pan before I go back and do anything else. I've lost count
> > at how many times I've been browsing the 20th newsgroup of a session,
> > only to have Pan crash without warning, and forgetting everything it's
> > done over the last hour.
> >
> > Am I mission a setting or something? Otherwise, this is a major
> > showstopper for me.
>
> You aren't missing a setting.  I've experienced the same problems and in
> fact I believe it's my bug.  However, Charles says implementing state
> saving could be a real drag on performance.
>
> My view is it's going to be far better than forcing the user to constantly
> worry about what he'll be losing in the event of a crash, and tracking his
> usage to decide when it's time to manually close and restart pan.
> However, I'm not the one doing the coding, so...
>
> A compromise would be to create two options, save settings when switching
> groups, and save settings every 10 minutes (or 5 or whatever).  If the
> user has a stable system, unchecking those options would avoid the
> performance drag Charles is concerned about.  If the user sees
> instability, checking one or both of the auto-save-settings options would
> mitigate the problem.
>
> It's worth pointing out that the instability isn't necessarily a pan
> problem either.  It can be a system problem (as it was in my case for
> awhile). However, pan's part of the system and has to work with whatever
> stability issues the system might have in addition to those it itself
> might have.

If it's a drag, then drag away. Having to close and restart after reading a 
newsgroup or two over and over again is simply unacceptable. Pan will crash 
seemingly at random. Tasks that are rock solid 95% of the time, will cause a 
crash at the most inopportune moment. Usually just before I would have 
finished reading Usenet anyway. But I'll then have to spend an extra half 
hour trying to remember what articles I read already, and what I've saved for 
later.

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