[Pan-users] Re: Mutlipart posts?

[Duncan]

fred <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 30 Sep 2006
11:36:34 -0500:

> With all the memory improvements lately (thanks Charles really helped me a
> lot) I was wondering if pan could carry it to the screen. When you have
> multipart post like partX.rar could pan stack them so  all one would see
> is one entry. This is assuming that they are already being stored as
> something like varible+varitation.rar. You could view what part is missing
> essentially by hitting a icon of some sort. This would clean up the header
> subject area and make it easier to find stuff. Depending on how it was
> done I would assume it could speed up sorting time as well. Just a
> thought.

pan actually already does that for multi-parts.  That is, when a single
file is spread over multiple posts, pan combines it into a single header
(unless it detects it incorrectly for some reason).  With the changes a
couple releases ago (so with 0.113 or so, don't remember exactly and don't
care sufficiently to go look it up), these will show up with a /3 or /5 or
/10 or whatever, indicating that many actual posts combined to make the
single multi-part post, generally with only a single attached file.

To see what I mean, try saving a single rar entry as shown in pan, but save
BOTH the attachment and the text.  It's very likely that you'll have only
one attachment, but have the generally 5-10 actual text articles shown in
the /X in the subject -- the actual posts that combined to make the single
attachment, that pan displayed as only a single entry.

However, with rar in particular, but also some other filetypes, it's not
uncommon to split a huge file into multiple smaller files at the posting
end, /before/ posting them.  Each of those smaller files is /still/ likely
split over multiple posts, and pan combines the posts for each file, but
does NOT combine the posts for multiple files, be they RAR or other
filetype.  From my perspective, I think that's best, as adding yet another
layer of combination makes it just that much easier for pan to mis-parse
something and have the entire series screwed up.

-- 
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