[Pan-users] Re: A couple of Pan question

[Duncan]

Ben Barto <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:12:23 -0400:

> -ThanksI&#39;m currently using Pan 0.132.  I&#39;m fairly certain some
> features are missing from the previous version, but I thought I&#39;d
> ask anyway. Firstly, in older versions of Pan, there was a
> &quot;Folders&quot; area, where posted messages were kept.  Is there any
> way to see which articles I&#39;ve posted to which newsgroups?  And
> secondly, I was formerly able to right click on a newsgroup and show the
> number of articles in that particular group.  This was especially useful
> in determining if the group was worthwhile.  Is there any way to see the
> total number of messages in a group?<br>
> <br><br>-Thanks<br><br>_______________________________________

First, you're posting to the pan list, a list some of us read /using/ 
pan.  If you can't be bothered to turn off HTML posting in general (for 
security reasons and because some people seriously boost the spam score 
of anything coming in as HTML, and not to look like one of those "Eternal 
September" people, google it if you need to), please at /least/ do so for 
the pan list, as you likely already know what HTML looks like in pan, or 
any other non-HTML client.

As for the questions...

The "folders" are gone, yes.  FWIW, there were complications to the 
previous implementation in any case, which caused a number of hard to 
resolve bugs.

There are two things that /partially/ replace them, or at least sent 
messages.

First, you download your posted messages like any others, now. (One of 
the bugs I mentioned above was that pan already had that message so it 
didn't download it when it came across it again, so you never saw if your 
message actually made it to the server without corruption, or not, since 
you always used the local copy.  That's not a problem now since your 
messages are downloaded like any other messages.)  Combine that with the 
fact that expiration is now dependent on your local pan settings, not on 
server settings, and you can retain any messages you download for as long 
as you wish.[1]

Second, pan now has the save-draft and open-draft functionality.  So 
**IF** you remember, for particularly important messages or those you've 
worked on for awhile and want to make sure they get to the server, you 
can save a draft, send the message, and if it doesn't make it, open the 
saved draft and resend.

Unfortunately, there's no way to automate that, and you have to remember 
to save the draft.

The total messages per group info doesn't appear to be available any 
more, unfortunately.  There have been requests to bring it back, and it 
likely will come back at some point, but it hasn't been as urgently or 
popularly requested as some of the other things on the list (bringing 
back something to replace rules, so there's a way to auto-download, for 
instance, and a way to categorize the group list for those that might 
subscribe to a whole bunch of groups, are the two most requested 
features, see previous discussion in the archives for the deal on those, 
but there's a workaround for group categories, at least).

Meanwhile, Charles' pan development has been very much on-again, off-
again.  He'll pretty much ignore it for a couple years, then come back 
and go great guns for a year or so, then ignore it for awhile again.  
Right now is one of the "ignore" periods, and we users, even the regulars 
here on the list, don't really have any idea when he'll get back to it.

In the mean time, however, one of the group regulars, K Haley, has git-
cloned the Gnome pan repository and is doing some patching and stuff.  
Who knows where that will eventually lead, but that's what a lot of the 
regulars are using now, since upstream has been pretty much dead for two 
years, now, even if that's not unusual and it has come back before.

.....

[1] Do note that pan's cache is only 10 MB by default, however, so if you 
don't change that, setting messages not to expire will keep the headers, 
but you'll lose the messages themselves pretty fast if you download 
binaries, in a few weeks, perhaps, if you do text-only and aren't too 
active.  There's a cache size setting in preferences.xml, but 
deliberately no GUI config option for it as that's considered too complex 
for simple Gnome user's minds to comprehend, apparently, so you can set 
it, but only by editing the config file directly, using a text editor or 
whatever.  I have my cache set to several gigs and my expiration 
disabled, and am still building messages after about two years now of 
use.  Of course, after some time doing that, pan does begin to take 
longer and longer to startup, but I have it set to start with kde, and 
seldom quit it except to reboot or restart X and kde, so that's not a big 
issue.

-- 
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