[Pan-users] Re: Pan usage between 2 machines

[Duncan]

Michael Wever posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Sun, 24 Aug 2003 17:48:53 +0200:

> I use Pan both at home and at work, and with big mailing lists it is
> annoying to keep track of two separate read/unread lists (especially on
> the heavy traffic lists).
> 
> Has anyone come across any smart way of synch-ing which messages in each
> list I have read across both my machines?
> 
> 
> The obvious answer is to share the .pan folder, but I suspect (even after
> turning off the cache) the performance would be painful. Looking into the
> .pan folder I could not see any particular file responsible for which
> messages are read/unread, and all the files are quite large.

Two things, here.  First, the answer to your question.  Under
Tools->News-Servers->Edit-Server dialog, check the option to use a newsrc
file and share it.  That's designed to be able to share server and group
tracking between applications, which don't even need to both be PAN, since
the newsrc file is fairly standardized.  Just don't try to run your apps
both at once, since this file is normally only read at pan open or when
switching servers. written when switching or at close.

Second..  a more general comment and observation..  It seems you are
having some of the same difficulties I am having figuring out what to call
the normally mailing lists we read thru gmane or some other news
interface..However, within this context it should be "big news groups",
since PAN doesn't on its own handle mailing lists, only news, and only
handles mailing lists because something else has converted them to news. 
IOW, it doesn't matter whether they are lists or news groups in general
distribution.  From PAN's perspective they are news groups, and since we
are talking about PAN's treatment of them, we should probably use that
terminology as well.

As I said, however, I'm having a bit of difficulty keeping this straight
myself, since I've been an avid news reader for years, now, and just want
to call entities such as this "groups" rather than "lists" since that's
the way I'm accessing them, despite the fact that doing so will likely mix
up some PAN users subscribed to the list that don't realize gmane is
there, or at least cause a pause and re-read, wen when they do know about
it if they continue to use the mail interface.    Thus, I DO still try to
call them "lists", tho OTOH IMO we should actually be using a news group
instead (tho that admittedly might complicate things when users need help
getting PAN working again after some problem a bit bigger than they can
handle alone.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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