[Pan-users] Re: Storing the Score file somewhere other than ~/News/ ?

[Duncan]

Søren Boll Overgaard posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Mon, 17 Apr 2006 10:55:22 +0200:

> Hi,
> 
> I am the package maintainer for pan in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution

=8^)  Your name is well received here.

> as such I have question relating to a bug[1] submitted by a Debian user.
> 
> Is there a good reason why pan stores its score file in ~/News/ rather
> than in ~/.pan2/ where everything else related to pan is stored?
> 
> And if so, would anyone mind if I came up with a patch to make it a
> command line option (or tweakable from the preferences)?
> 
> 
> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=362904

The score file is a fairly standard layout shared with a number of other
clients, not something unique to PAN.  As such, I believe the thought was
that it should be in a common location, as well, the better to allow
transparent sharing.  If you check other *ix news clients, I'm guessing
that at least one besides PAN will use that location by default.  (Gnews
rings a bell, but the memory is fuzzy so that might not be it.)

In 0.14 series PAN, the location of the scorefile was configurable in the
preferences dialog.  (I had mine relocated to the ~/.pan/data/ dir, too.)

The preferences dialog had been temporarily removed from the 0.9x series
to see what options folks actually needed.. 0.93 has it back, but I've not
yet compiled 0.93 (planning to after I catch up on the lists) so I'm not
sure if that preference is there yet or not (there was only one mention of
it until yours, so it hadn't looked all that needed yet).

With your request from Debian, Charles will probably put it back if it's
not there already, given Debian's status.

Personally, I too think it should default to pan2, but should be
configurable in case someone /is/ interested in sharing it.  However, that
/would/ break any "just works" functionality, having PAN "magically" pick
up the score file someone was already using, so there's definitely a
trade-off.

In any case, patching it should be fine.  If it was GNKSA compliance,
there might be an issue because that's something Charles has always
insisted on for PAN, but file locations...  patching apps to better fit to
a distribution's own directory scheme is part of what distributions /do/,
so there shouldn't be a problem.

-- 
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 in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html