Re: [Pan-users] Re: Feature Request

[Frank Van Damme]

On Monday 26 August 2002 06:41, David Rosenthal wrote:
> >This rather goes against the entire philosophy of Unix/Linux -- that you
> > should have tools that do one thing and do it well. Pan does news and it
> > does it well.
> >
> >--
> >Toby A Inkster BSc ARCS
>
> Well, to me it IS only one thing, Toby.  I'm sending text to a server
> via the Internet.  Or I'm reading text from a server retrieved via the
> Internet.
>
> >No thanks, please don't bloat Pan with something irrelevant for a
> >newsreader.  Forwarding and replying by email is relevant.  Reading
> >email or composing from scratch aren't.
>
> Could you please explain to me what the difference is between writing
> text to upload to a news server and writing text to upload to a mail
> server?  If the functionality to do one is already present, then the
> functionality is present for the other.

News and email are totally different.

- news is a public forum, mail is a private affair.
- the protocol is different: authenticating to dl messages only you can read 
vs. text which is distributed over the 'net.
- Saved messages are handled differently: news is read and after a while 
purged, email otoh is backed up! It's just weird to see mail folders next to 
news groups in the same program. 
- Even mailing lists are different from news, they're often private or 
restricted to a certain audience. 
-servers are handled different: servers' functions overlap, because you can 
use one server used for binaries, which does not have your local 
alt.central-african.cooking, but you can mix and match articles from 
comp.os.debian from both (pan doesn't yet do this).
- sorting and folders are different: spam is handled identical usually, but 
email can be sorted by eg recipient for mailing lists, while for news there 
is no specific recipient - news messages are by itself sorted per audience 
(in groups). There's only scoring there (and more important for news then for 
mail). They just contain different types of data. Same for sent messages.
- your private emails don't get accidentally posted on usenet so easily :)

> I do agree that needless bloat is undesirable and that no program can
> be all things to all users.  I understand that the sorry state of
> Windows software is at least partially due to feature creep.
>
> On the other hand, why should I have to have two different programs
> that compose a text message and upload it to a server when the only
> difference is the protocol used to upload the message to each server,
> and both protocols are already written into Pan?

Pan doesn't do pop3. smtp is just for forwarding stuff and replying 
personally. 

<SNIP> 

> >Agree!! Since I have to revert to my p133/48 for some time (blown cpu in
> > my other box :-/ )
>
> Sorry to hear about your loss.  I hope it won't cost too much to
> replace it.  Why not just go with a text based reader running in a
> console and get rid of X entirely?
> Respectfully,

68,50 usd incl. shipping ;) (it was a slot A athlon --> have to get a 
secondhand one)

Can the console offer me what I do under X? I don't think so. I can get 
keyboard shortcuts in Pan too, thanks :) . Besides I think gnu/linux should 
still make a useable graphical desktop on a machine like this. After all 
people allready surfed the web, typed letters and sent email and news (be it 
maybe with different programs ;) ) when it was state-of-the-art.


-- 
Frank Van Damme
homepage:       www.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~m9917684
jabber (=IM):   address@hidden