[Pan-users] Re: 0.129 - a few minor issues

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 11 May 2007 16:08:10
+0000:

[On unread messages not displaying until read/unread is toggled.]

> I rarely do binaries, and I see it frequently - even in text-only groups
> with a low traffic rate.  For instance, I monitor a private server's
> control.cancel group, and usually there's only a handful of messages in
> there, but I almost never see the new messages without doing the read/
> unread thing.

Hmm...  I wonder what the difference is?  I see from a different reply 
you pull headers automatically at startup, but not upon entering a group, 
or I'd suggest the group entry pull might be the trigger.  Maybe it's 
simply a race condition I don't see, with my dual Opteron and huge 
memory. <shrug>

I'd definitely call it a bug, however, and I'd be frustrating if I had 
it.  I'm just curious now why I don't.

>>> 3.  It would also be nice if the group list could be sorted by news
>>> server
>> 
>> This won't work particularly well, since most groups will be on most
>> servers.
> 
> Maybe for you, but not for me.  I use forums.novell.com,
> news.povray.org, news.vmware.com, and a couple others - all
> special-purpose servers with their own distinct sets of newsgroups.

True.  I'm actually that way on my text groups too, since the gmane 
groups don't appear elsewhere, and the Cox groups don't appear elsewhere 
either, and that's most of my text groups.  However, in the general case, 
groups will appear on multiple servers, so sorting by server doesn't work 
that well.  As I mentioned and you agreed would work, however, another 
level in the tree, so subscribed groups could be categorized by the user, 
is a requested feature that should make it in post-1.0.

>> Meanwhile, something you CAN do is create multiple pan instances, each
>> with its own settings.  Here, I have a text instance, a binary
>> instance, and a test instance, but one could arrange it however they
>> wanted.
> 
> Yes, that *could* work, but in terms of operational efficiency,
> obviously this is less than optimal.  This is functionality I use from
> old pan with the different servers from the menu - I'm actually liking
> the unified view the more I use it (it's saving me keystrokes, not a bad
> thing at all), but because all the servers I use hold different groups,
> I have, for example, irtc.* (from povray's news server) near the top but
> the povray.* groups appear after my novell.* groups.  This means that
> mentally I have to switch from hobby to work and back to hobby when I'm
> going through the groups.

Yes, that's an issue.  Eventually the user categorization feature will 
resolve it, but meanwhile, one either has to get used to "thinking back 
and forth", or go to the trouble of multiple pan sessions, neither of 
which is optimal.

>>> 4.[...]  it would be nice, though, if a posting profile could be
>>> used on multiple servers
>> 
>> Putting the posting server to use in the posting profile was a bit of a
>> hack. [...]  When the discussion
>> came up as to where exactly to put the posting server setting, such
>> that it could be set for each group separately, I suggested putting it
>> in the posting profile, as it seemed logical to me that it would be
>> configured in the same place as all the other posting preferences[.]
>> Charles said he wasn't entirely happy with it [o]nly nobody else
>> could come up with anything better
> 
> Now that I've played with it a bit more, it seems to be slightly broken
> - I added a second posting profile for one of the servers for a specific
> group where I wanted a - shall we say - more controversial sig line -
> and now it seems to pick that for all my gmane groups as well unless I
> explicitly tell it which profile to use.  I'm guessing the duplicate
> server name is throwing it off.

It remembers the profile you set per group, but you have to set it 
first.  If you set it, and pan didn't crash so didn't save it, it should 
remember what you used last time and use the same profile the next time 
you post from the same group.  If it doesn't, there's a bug.  However, it 
may be that you just haven't set it for all groups yet, and that's what 
you are seeing the first time you try to post from a group that's not yet 
been set.

I've not seen nor read of any bugginess in the memory, so if you are 
seeing it and it's not simply on groups you haven't posted from before, 
it's probably a fresh bug and should be bugged so it can be fixed.

> I also noticed that if you view "watched" (with the button), it shows
> just the messages that are watched rather than the thread - because of
> the way I work, this is less useful, because I need to be able to see
> the whole thread.

You need to change what's shown.  You probably have it set to show only 
matching articles.  You want to show either the subthread or the entire 
thread.  Look in the menu under View/header-pane/show...  That 
functionality was in old-pan as well, so I'm surprised you didn't pickup 
on it.  Maybe you'd set it long ago and forgotten about it...

-- 
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