[Pan-users] Re: 0.129 - a few minor issues

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 10 May 2007 17:36:08
+0000:

> Just built and installed 0.129 and overall I like it a lot - thanks for
> all the hard work, Charles!
> 
> I've noticed a few odd things, though:
> 
> 1.  Sometimes when I pull down new messages, I see the new message
> header count in the newsgroup list, and if I go through all of the
> messages that are unread, Pan tells me that there is still an unread
> message.  I've assigned a hotkey to the "read/unread" item in the header
> view menu, and if I show all messages and then immediately show the
> unread messages, the remaining unread messages show up.  There doesn't
> seem to be a pattern to this behaviour, at least not that I can see.

Someone else with a hotkey on read/unread. =8^)

I don't see this particular bug, however.  The unread count seems 
accurate to me (tho I tend to go months without doing binaries at all, 
and it's been exactly that, and text groups don't have the raw post 
quantity so may not trigger the issue).

> 2.  It would be nice if it were possible to set a posting profile on
> multiple groups at the same time.

Now that Charles added the much requested multi-group-select feature back 
(he had said it was "non-trivial", and didn't expect to add it until 
after 1.0, but there /were/ a lot of requests, so...), it's at least 
possible to think about.  Without multi-group-select at all, this 
particular aspect didn't matter.

> 3.  It would also be nice if the group list could be sorted by news
> server - I'm still getting used to having all the groups in one list,
> but having groups from one news server interspersed with groups from
> another news server causes me to have to shift gears more often than I
> otherwise would.

This won't work particularly well, since most groups will be on most 
servers.  Something that /would/ work would be user categorization, the 
ability to have multiple user labeled categories under subscribed groups 
into which users could separate their groups.  However, that's almost 
certainly a post-1.0 feature (but a much requested one which shouldn't be 
an extreme amount of work, so it should eventually appear).

Meanwhile, something you CAN do is create multiple pan instances, each 
with its own settings.  Here, I have a text instance, a binary instance, 
and a test instance, but one could arrange it however they wanted.

The idea is to use the PAN_HOME environmental variable that pan reads if 
set to see where to find its configuration and data files.  Have a number 
of pan starter scripts, pan.bin, pan.txt, pan.tst here, that set this 
variable (and possibly others, like the GTK config dirs, and cd to an 
appropriate working dir, this I added when pan dumped scratch files in it 
in some cases) appropriately, before actually starting pan.  Then if you 
don't want to launch the scripts manually all the time, replace the 
single pan entry in your menu/button/hotkey launcher with multiple 
entries, one for each pan instance, as appropriate.

My pan.bin starter script as an example (PANDIR is set globally in my 
bashrc as ~/pan, note the GTK2_RC_FILES line wraps):

#!/bin/bash
export GTK2_RC_FILES="/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:/h/x/.gtkrc-2.0:/h/x/kde3.5/
share/config/gtkrc-2.0"
export PAN_HOME=$PANDIR/bin
cd ~/pan/scraps
exec /usr/bin/pan $*

Then in addition to the instance subdirs, I have a ~/pan/globals dir, 
which contains files (such as the scorefile and accels.txt) that are 
common to all instances.  I then symlink the globals files from the 
individual instance configs as necessary.

One great advantage to this is that I can have separate cache settings 
(among others) for binaries and text.  My binaries cache is 12 gig, 
symlinked to a separate/dedicated partition.  I'll download to cache, 
then work locally until I'm thru with it and then delete it (simply mkfs 
the partition again), before updating the binaries groups again.  My text 
cache remains in my home dir, set to five gig, never expiring, so I can 
reread posts long since expired on the server, if desired.

(The cache size setting, BTW, is considered an advanced setting, and like 
several similar settings, is configurable only manually, editing the 
config file itself.  preferences.xml, cache-size-megs or something 
similar.)

> 4.  I like how the posting profile is determined automatically most of
> the time - it would be nice, though, if a posting profile could be used
> on multiple servers - I use the same name and fake e-mail address on two
> servers, and have two profiles set up for that purpose now.  Not a big
> deal now that it's set up, but it took a minute to figure out why I was
> receiving an error while trying to post.  Maybe the posting server could
> be set to use the server hosting the group (or a primary server hosting
> the group if you're subscribed to multiple servers holding the same
> group) with the posting profile selection being able to override what
> Pan figures out on its own.

Putting the posting server to use in the posting profile was a bit of a 
hack.  I suggested it and Charles used it as no one had a better 
suggestion.  Before that, pan would post using the first configured 
server that happened to carry a group, which often wasn't the desired 
behavior at all, but hadn't been configurable.  When the discussion came 
up as to where exactly to put the posting server setting, such that it 
could be set for each group separately, I suggested putting it in the 
posting profile, as it seemed logical to me that it would be configured 
in the same place as all the other posting preferences, and that one 
could simply choose one of possibly several posting profiles for a group 
and set everything about posting, handle/email, sig, custom headers, and 
server to use, all at once.  However, not everybody seems to think it's 
as intuitive a place for it as it seems to me as others have had comments 
similar to yours, and Charles said he wasn't entirely happy with it 
either.  Only nobody else could come up with anything better, so that's 
what was used.  If you believe you have a better idea, by all means, 
let's discuss it.   I can't say I'll like it better personally as this 
one seems perfectly intuitive to me, but as I said, it's not always so 
for others, so maybe there's something better only nobody has figured it 
out yet. =8^)

> 5.  It would be helpful if the scores for a thread were calculated and
> that value displayed when a thread is not expanded.

I use expanded by default, so wouldn't find this of much use here, but 
I'm sure many would.

> 6.  I also have to say I preferred in 0.14.x when the entire line in the
> header pane was colour coded, rather than just the score column.

Same here!  I'm not actually sure why Charles made it just the score 
column in new-pan, but I too preferred coloring the entire line.

-- 
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