Re: [Pan-users] Maximum Headers?

[Duncan]

Christopher Fraracci posted on Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:01:54 -0400 as
excerpted:

> Hi,
>  I am new to using Pan, been using Grab-It for the last decade. Made the
> transition to Linux and found Pan for checking usenet, works good but I
> have a small issue. Is there anyway to set the default number of
> headers?
> Some of the groups I'd like to use have hundreds of thousands of
> headers,
> and I only want it to grab say the last fifty thousand or so, and then
> regular daily updates after that. Is this possible? Thanks for any help.
> I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 and the newest version of Pan from the Software
> Center.
> <div dir="ltr"><div>Hi, <br></div> I am new to using Pan, been using
> Grab-It for the last decade. Made the transition to Linux and found Pan
> for checking usenet, works good but I have a small issue. Is there
> anyway to set the default number of headers? Some of the groups I&#39;d
> like to use have hundreds of thousands of headers, and I only want it to
> grab say the last fifty thousand or so, and then regular daily updates
> after that. Is this possible? Thanks for any help. I&#39;m using Ubuntu
> 12.04 and the newest version of Pan from the Software Center.<br> </div>

No need to repeat yourself twice, especially not with HTML.  Many here
(including me) use pan (via gmane.org's list2news service) to read and
reply to this group, and if you're using pan you've likely already seen
the effect of that.  So if you /must/ use it elsewhere, please at least
turn it off when posting to this list.  No personal offense intended, but
frankly, I don't believe I'm the only one here who believes plain text,
with *MARKUP* /like/ _this_ if desired, is quite sufficient, and given the
security issues of HTML messages, there's only three classes of people
that choose to post with it, the spammers trying to fancy up their message
or hide something, the spyware and malware folks trying to hide their
dirty work, and the people who simply no no better and haven't thought
about the security implications of HTML messages.  (Consider all the
security issues mail clients have had over the years.  How many of them
were issues for plain-text-only mail clients?)  Which one of these three
are you?  (Rhetorical question.  I'm obviously assuming the last, and that
you'll change after having the argument presented to you.)

It's not clear from your post whether you've found this or not (maybe you
did and just want a different default for N), but it's possible to fetch
either the last N days worth of headers, or the last N headers, as well as
to fetch them all, and to fetch from your last update.  There are three
header-fetch menu options (with three different corresponding toolbar
buttons); the "Get Headers..." one is what you want.  As is traditional
with menu entries, the "..." indicates that invoking that function will
open a dialog -- in this case, one that has all the options mentioned
above.

Set the option you want and hit Execute and it'll go to work, fetching
headers based on the selected option, for the current group only.  This
function/button is designed specifically for times when fetching all new
headers (which would mean all of them on a new group) isn't desired.

(The other two header-fetch buttons/menu-entries are fetch new headers,
for either subscribed or selected groups, one button each.  Of course both
of these will fetch all headers for any groups that haven't been fetched
before.)

If you'd already found that and simply wanted a different default, at
least here (running live-git pan, pulled yesterday but the only update 
from the previous pull was a translation update, so I didn't bother 
rebuilding), pan appears to remember the value of "N" for both number of 
headers and number of days, between sessions.  However, it only appears 
to remember which radio-button option from the dialog was selected, 
within the same session.  A new session always appears to default to the 
top choice, get the last N days' headers.

Beyond that, of course pan is freedomware.  If you don't like the 
defaults encoded in the sources, you can of course patch them to change 
those defaults... as I do for a few other packages.  (I run gentoo and 
only install freedomware (with the exception of a few firmware files), so 
build all my packages from sources.  As such, making sure a particular 
patch is applied is normally a simple matter of dropping it in the 
appropriate directory so it is automatically found and applied every time 
that package is updated.)

However, there are a few pan settings that don't appear in the GUI for 
various reasons, but are honored if they're changed in the config files.  
It's not necessary to patch and rebuild pan to change these, only to edit 
the appropriate config file or set the appropriate environmental 
variable.  I've posted the list here a number of times, so you can check 
the list archives (maybe on gmane =:^) if you're interested, or ask and 
I'll repost, as I believe it has been awhile.

Or just take a look at the config files (normally found in ~/.pan2/) 
yourself, and you'll find most of 'em. =:^)

-- 
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