[Pan-users] Re: hierarchical view?

[Duncan]

Woo Hoo posted on Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:37:59 -0700 as excerpted:

> This is a newbie question about pan. I'm using pan 0.133 on linux.
> 
> In my headers pane, I have "thread headers" turned on. If I select "show
> matching articles," I get something like this:
>   . Re: cabbages and kings (2)
>     Re: cabbages and kings
>     Re: sealing wax
>     Re: sealing wax
>   . Re: sealing wax (1)
>     Re: sealing wax
>     Re: sealing wax
> The "." symbols represent little triangles. If I click on them, I get
> replies to that post.
> 
> Is there some way to make pan show me this hierarchy at a higher level?
> In other words, I want to be able to "zoom out" so that what I see is
> this:
>   . Re: cabbages and kings
>   . Re: sealing wax
> Otherwise I find it very difficult to see what's going on in a busy
> newsgroup. If there are 10 threads running at once, and each one is
> listed in the GUI with 50 different lines, then I have 500 lines in my
> header pane that I have to scroll through. I also can't see the nesting
> of the hierarchy. Is there any way to get it to display a tree structure
> of some kind, like this?
>   Re: cabbages and kings
>     Re: cabbages and kings
>     Re: cabbages and kings
>       Re: cabbages and kings
>       Re: cabbages and kings
>       Re: cabbages and kings
>       Re: cabbages and kings
>     Re: cabbages and kings

Pan does two types of message nesting, depending on the type of post.

First, it does conventional threading, using the references header, which 
lists message IDs in the "upline".  These will show the little expander 
triangles for replies according to the references header.  However, if a 
common parent post isn't shown, either because it has already expired, or 
because show only unread messages is set and the message was read in a 
previous session, or due to defective news clients that mangled beyond 
help the references header or eliminated it entirely (unfortunately, there 
are clients that do that, destroying the threading), there's no common 
ancestor to thread the messages under, so they show up as separate threads.

If the problem is simply due to showing only unread messages, you can of 
course switch to showing all messages, thereby showing the previously read 
thread parents and providing the upline messages for all the children to 
be threaded under.  If the messages are simply not there, however, due 
either to jumping in in the middle of the thread, when they'd already 
expired off the server and thus were never downloaded, or to too fast 
expiry set for pan locally, or because some client is mangling the 
references header, that obviously won't work.

Pan does not implement the by-subject "pseudo-threading" that some clients 
have, because just because the subject is the same doesn't mean it's the 
same thread.  Pan always uses the references header, so if it's incorrect, 
well...

One way around this is to use either sort by subject, so you can scroll 
thru entire subjects at a time as they're at least grouped. OR use the 
message search feature, thus hiding all messages not matching the current 
search.

The second type of message nesting, really combining in this case, that 
pan does, is for multipart binaries.  For these messages, pan combines all 
the parts that form a single message into one, for display and memory 
efficiency purposes.  Typically, a DVD or CD ISO will be manually split 
into several parts pre-posting, then each of those parts will be 
automatically split by the client when posting, to keep individual 
messages below a certain size or line-count.  Sometimes, a distinction may 
be made between the automatic and manually split message parts by calling 
one or the other segments, as opposed to parts, but the usage there isn't 
consistent enough to be sure that segments always refers to one or the 
other, so despite the fact that what I'm calling "manual" splitting can be 
done automatically as well, I'm using the automatic/manual terminology 
here, since the lowest level is almost always an automatic split, while 
the higher level split is indeed often (tho not always) handled manually.  
Anyway, pan combines the automatic splits back into one for display.  The 
manual splits are, to the client, separate posts appearing as part of a 
series, and pan maintains them that way.  However, in some groups this can 
reduce the message-count by two orders of magnitude, so the savings in 
both display space and memory can be substantial.  But this sort of 
message combining appears as just that -- pan displays it as a single 
message, on a single line, no expanders.

-- 
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