Re: [Pan-users] interface bug

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson posted on Fri, 8 Mar 2024 06:51:23 -0000 (UTC) as excerpted:

> On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 21:09:37 -0800, dchmelik-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w
> wrote:
> 
>> Earlier today I was reading usenet & gmane but suddenly when I went to
>> gmane.org.unix-heritage.general and selected an article to read, it no
>> longer loads it rather than doing a popup asking to save articles.  I
>> even exited, and removed preferences.xml (always seems to get corrupted
>> and cause bugs/crashes) and restarted and went back to select article.
>> It did the same thing.  Apparently the article contains a .png that
>> when I pressed right mouse button and selected 'read article' loaded
>> that. Afterwards I could read plain-text articles fine.
> 
> I've observed this behavior as well - you get the save dialog if you
> just open it by using "next" to move through posts, but if you hit
> escape and then hit enter, it'll load the image in the message pane.
> 
> I see this on gmane on in povray.binaries.images quite regularly. 
> There's a size threshold that it hits before it asks to save rather than
> viewing by default.

AFAIK it's not a size threshold per se, but rather, it happens with a 
message split into several parts (sub-messages, each sent separately, not 
multiple parts as in a text part, and html part, maybe other parts, all 
sent in different sections of the same message, the other meaning of 
multi-part) for sending.  Because this tends to happen with larger 
messages it does somewhat correspond to size, but the same message sent 
with a single-part size set low enough to trigger pre-send splitting and 
sending of those separate parts as different messages will trigger this 
when pan encounters it, while it won't if the single-part size was set 
high enough that it was sent as a single un-split message.

IOW, basically it's pan saying "Hey, there's multiple parts here to deal 
with, do you want me to assemble them and save as I might process a 
binary, or do you want to cancel that process?"... which then allows you 
to hit enter or whatever you have the read-message shortcut set to, to 
assemble the message parts manually and display it as if it were a single-
part message (which you can then of course trigger save on if you want, 
just as you could on a normal single-part message).

Meanwhile, if you attach one or more things to a single message (which 
then appear in the raw message as multiple sections), which then exceeds 
the size of a single part so it is pre-split before sending, then you have 
both meanings of multi-part applying to the same message and it can be 
REALLY confusing.

... Which of course is usually what happens if a person posts a message 
with both text and a binary attachment (thus multi-part in the one sense) 
big enough to trigger a split (thus also multi-part in the other 
sense)...  It's no wonder people get confused... or that I encounter such 
difficulty trying to describe the result! =:^)

Oh, and if you're curious where pan's split-size setting is for the posts 
you send, check preferences, upload tab. =:^)

(These days it's not such a big deal, but consider people on dialup who 
might have spent an hour or longer on a single message only to have it 
error out.  Better to have the sizes small enough so you can get each part 
in say 5 minutes with reassembly after download, perhaps redownloading 
just the one bad part or asking for someone who got it correctly to repost 
it.  Actually, that sort of splitting made reposting just a single part 
difficult, so other sorts of pre-post-splitting eventually took its place 
and good posters would use them and set the posting client's auto-split 
size a bit larger so the posting client would never actually do a split 
like this, but the option remains and autosplitting still occurs if the 
split size is low enough to trigger it, which it can be if someone tries 
to attach too much and doesn't use some other form of pre-splitting.)

-- 
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