[Pan-users] Re: ANNOUNCE: pan-attach and pan-attach-kd, version 0.0.2006.10.07.0

[Duncan]

Graham <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 08 Oct
2006 13:27:46 +0100:

> As you suggest, perhaps we could have full binary posting in Pan in 2.0.
> But is there sense in "reinventing the wheel"?  Couldn't Pan just use
> newspost?

Well, consider that pan is a program already accessing the news server in
its own right.  As such, it has already implemented a lot of the necessary
code including all the networking code to do its own attachments to the
text posts already possible.  It therefore makes little sense for it to
act as a news-post front-end, as implementing the GUI for that would be
just as much work as implementing its own GUI and encoding, but being able
to do it pan's own way.

It's different for the previously mentioned dedicated front-ends, of
course, as that's /all/ they are, is front-ends.  They don't have all the
rest of the infrastructure already implemented, as pan does.

Of course for me as a scripter, the difference is even bigger.  Certainly,
there are python or perl or the like libraries I could integrate, but
that'd likely be less efficient than front-ending a purpose-built
application.  (BTW, I tried learning perl but the "more than one way to do
it" philosophy didn't work so well for me learning on my own anyway. I've a
goal to try python next but have been sitting on the books for awhile,
finding other stuff, like learning kdialog and bashing out shell scripts
with it, to do instead. =8^)  In the case of pan-attach, I already knew
the purpose-built (for news) application, tho I did have to learn the
kdialog and do a bit of research to find uudeview and learn it.  In the
case of newspost, I'll already know kdialog, and I already what the other
app is, newspost, tho I'll have to learn how its command line works in
ordered to script it properly.

-- 
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