[Pan-users] Re: How do I get a header count for all groups?

[Duncan]

Aniruddha <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 01
Sep 2007 07:36:58 +0200:

> By default pan doesn't display the header count for each group which can
> make it very difficult to tell which groups are worth subscribing. Is is
> possible in pan 1.32 to get a header count for all? groups (just like
> the stable version?) Thanks in advance!

1.32 ?? There is no such pan version.  pan has not yet had a 1.0, so 
every version starts with 0.  If you are seeing 1.32, your distribution 
has apparently screwed with things pretty drastically (that is, not just 
minor patches like install locations, to help it fit in with your 
distribution better).  Perhaps you mean 0.132, the newest version, tho 
it's also possible you are talking about the very old now 0.13.x series.  
Assuming 0.132...

I too miss the total count, unread/total.  I'm not sure why Charles ended 
up doing it that way.

However, since sometime after 0.120 I believe (can't be bothered to look 
up exactly when), it's now possible to select multiple groups.  You 
should therefore be able to select multiple groups and get overviews 
(technically incorrectly but more popularly and in pan headers) for all 
of them.  As long as you either get all overviews, or get overviews for N 
days, that should then give you a decent comparison, assuming large 
segments of them haven't been previously marked read, either from 
previous visits or due to reading groups from which they've been cross-
posted.  If necessary, you can toggle off the view unread only filter, 
select all, and mark unread, so everything shows up as unread once again 
(assuming your expiry settings haven't deleted a bunch of them).  Of 
course, the marking unread would have to be done a group at a time.  
Since pan DOES show unread post numbers, once you have them all marked 
unread, you have a count of what's in the group.

Do note, however, that pan now counts posts a bit differently than it 
did, so the numbers in multi-part groups will be /dramatically/ lower -- 
but still useful for comparison against other multi-part groups.  Where a 
single message was split into multiple message segments (multiple 
separate message-ids), pan only displays (and counts) one, with the 
number of individual segments only temporarily shown (in the single 
subject line), if not all segments are available.  Once all are 
available, the number of segments drops out of the subject line.  This is 
of course distinct from someone posting a large binary pre-split into 
multiple parts, each of which may be multiple segments.  In that case, 
the multiple parts show up separately, but the individual segments of 
each again do not.

In addition to avoiding visual clutter, this is one of the ways in which 
pan now scales better.  It stores the multiple segment entries together, 
avoiding duplication and saving memory and disk space, as well as display 
space.  Additionally, pan now pre-threads entries once, saving that to 
disk instead of rethreading each time pan is started.  Startup time is 
therefore faster too, both because there's less data to load in off disk 
(only one entry where there used to be many, as above) and because it 
doesn't have to rethread what it had already threaded previously.

-- 
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