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[Pan-users] Re: Is this project still alive?
From: |
Duncan |
Subject: |
[Pan-users] Re: Is this project still alive? |
Date: |
Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:50:25 +0000 (UTC) |
User-agent: |
Pan/0.133 (House of Butterflies) |
address@hidden posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on
Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:00:03 +0200:
> On Monday 13 April 2009 19:55:30 JCA wrote:
>> The most recent version of this software is some eight months old.
>> Is this project still under development?
>
> Sure hope so because I use this near perfect news reader daily.
>
> I think slow development means code is very stable and nearly perfect
Well, it's not there yet. PAN originally stood for "Pimp-ass
Newsreader", and by that measure, pan has some way to go yet. In fact
the rewrite is still lacking one of the big features that was there
before the rewrite, rules it was called back then, that allowed someone
to say auto-delete ignored messages, auto-mark-read low (negative) scored
messages, and auto-download watched (or all, if desired) messages. Two
other oft requested but missing useful features are binary posting, and
scoring/filtering on the entire post, not just overviews. Automated
parfile handling would be nice, too.
Don't get me wrong. Pan is quite good, in many ways the best available
on *ix. But it's far from perfect. There are newsreaders with each of
the above features so it's doable, tho I'm not sure if there's one that
has the above plus everything pan has already. But were it to have all
those features plus what it already does, it would indeed be living up to
its goal and name as a "pimp-ass newsreader"! Meanwhile, back in
reality, as I said, there's some way to go still.
As for continued development... Charles, the pan primary dev, has a way
of doing pan development in fits and spurts. He'll go great guns for
awhile, for example, after the rewrite to C++ came out, there were nearly
weekly beta releases for over a year.
Other times nothing at all seems to happen for a year or more at a time.
0.133 came out exactly a year (to the day) after 0.132, and it didn't
have any major changes, mostly just compile fixes against new versions of
shared libraries and for new versions of gcc, and an important security
fix. Since then, it has been almost nine months, so the total "fits"
time has been almost two years now.
But, between the last 0.14.x series release and the first 0.90 (rewrite)
release was more like three years, IIRC, and the last one there had been
a maintenance release as well, so there had been little public
development on it for four years or so. Of course, during part of that
Charles was certainly coding away in private on the rewrite, but nobody
knew that. We had all begun to think it was abandoned and a few people
had begun experimenting with their own branches.
It'd be nice if pan had a group of devs, stable and steady enough to
continue at least slow development during Charles' off times. However,
that hasn't happened. (I wish I were a coder.) Meanwhile, it IS a
volunteer project he's doing more or less as a hobby -- there's little
pay tho occasionally something might show up in the tip jar. As such,
any time he chooses to spend on it is a gift, not something we can
demand. If someone with the coding skills wants to take the code and
move forward with it, either cooperatively with Charles or on his own,
it's GPLed so that's possible, but meanwhile, what's there is there, and
gets worked on when Charles decides he wants to.
--
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