Re: [Pan-devel] My list of present problems with Pan.

[Heinrich Müller]

Am Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:13:48 +0000 schrieb SciFi:

> Hi,
> 
> I should probably post the concerns I'm still having with Pan.  I sent
> this to imhotep82 (Heinrich Müller, before he became judgefudge), and to
> lostcoder (K. Haley) some months ago.  These will likely apply to
> whatever platform I end-up building.  My current Pan build can be seen
> with this post's headers under User-Agent (I'll send judgefudge the
> patches that "enhance" that string, soonish).
> 
Which patch? I see the user-agent with the git branch and commit checksum 
already in my headers. But feel free to drop me a mail.
> -*-
> 
> 1.
> 
> a)  For Pan's HTML highlighting feature (View->Body_Pane->Highlight
> URLs)
> we need the Tilde character '~' to be accepted as part of the URL
> (sometimes I call this a 'squiggle' <g>).  Presently, Pan is stopping
> the highlighting/copying at just-before this character when it's part of
> the honest-to-goodness URL.  All unix-type servers use this character to
> denote a user's "home folder" no matter how it is structured on that
> server.  We see these kinds of URLs all over the developers lists at
> Gmane and in the world-wide Usenet.  For now, we must do the drag-copy
> of the URL and manually paste it into our browsers.  There are several
> more characters that ought to be acceptable -- look at the way Gmane
> scrambles the URLs and email-addys, such Pan-highlighting does not seem
> to include '+' and '-', either; but don't take this as a sole-missing
> list.  ;)
> 
> b)  Some other characters are being accepted by Pan's Highlighting code,
> which should *not* be accepted.  For example, when someone uses
> parentheses for the URL such as (http://whatever.com/) , the trailing
> right-parens ')' is being highlighted as if it is part of the URL, and
> being passed to the browser as well (which likely gets a 404).
> (I know this logic could make one go crazy trying to code-around it, but
> that's why we have open URL/URI type libraries, isn't it?  <g>)
> 
> -*-
Good point, noted. 
> 2.
> 
> Every time I start-up Pan, the Header pane itself is initially "too
> wide" with its scroll-bar opening to the right-side.  In my setup, it's
> the Bytes column's numbers are barely visible, it's been scrolled-off
> the view that far.
>(...)
I can't reproduce your errors here. I had those, too, but I found a fix
that works for me and incorporated it into the code. I'll take another 
look if I have the time....
> 3.  Some of the IP-Number Displays still don't show the Port Number,
> mainly in the pop-up "yellow boxes", but in other areas also such as in
> the Posting Profile preferences at "Post Articles via:" drop-down list.
> My explanation:
> I use stunnel going to/from every NNTP server anymore.  All network
> paths in Pan need to be set to '127.0.0.1:<port>' for the corresponding
> entry in my stunnel.conf file.  I had been adding several lines in my
> /etc/hosts file to give various pseudo-hostnames to 127.0.0.1, just so I
> could get Pan to show each choice in a different way.  I don't know why,
> but OSX seems to want to go outside the box, still, to try finding the
> route for those pseudo-hosts, or some crazy related notion (blame Apple
> again for messing-up the standard *ix methods).  So I've gone back to
> entering precisely '127.0.0.1' inside Pan, but now I've lost being able
> to discern which line mean which path thru stunnel.  See?  ;)
> 
I'll add it.
> -*-
> 
> 4.  I would love to see some visual indicators for some text-formatting
> settings being used.  I need to see whether word-wrap is in effect, for
> the main issue here -- there are posts that don't much give a clue,
> because they would look "ugly" either way.  ;)  Things like that.  I
> would pick the area on the main Pan window to put these
> indicators/selectors, after the various "Match" icons and a
> separator-line thingy.
Could be done, I'll think of it.
> 
> -*-
> 
> 5.  Before accepting a "version 1.0" of Pan, I have written requests
> over the years to have more "multi-threading" incorporated into the
> program.
> (...)
Pan's error lies in the design: It loads those things in the main thread,
so all gets stuck. A callback would be perfect here.
> 
> c)  I'm sure I've reported more needs for "multi-threading", some may
> have been opened as official bug-reports and carefully documented
> already. Otherwise, I've lost my listings -- I'll probably need to go
> thru the mailing-lists and read my archived posts one-by-one and
> re-generate these points.  :(
> 
> -*-
> 
> 6.  I'm still having my problem in the GUI when I highlight any text for
> preparation for copy-&-paste operation.  I reported it here to the
> pan-user list some months ago:
Honestly, I blame OSX for this :p