Re: [Pan-users] New Feature - Uploading binaries

[Duncan]

K. Haley posted on Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:45:54 -0600 as excerpted:

> There's no way around this until I get the new back-end written.

Interesting.  Long ago, before pan2/pan-0.90, there had been discussion 
of using a sqlite based backend.  But then the rewrite came, with 
something similar to the previous text-based backend except that pan made 
more efficient use of memory by combining occurrences of (certain) 
strings like author names, and I hadn't seen anything else on a different 
backend since then.  Certainly, as Charles was apparently even then 
losing interest a bit [1], there wasn't any talk from him.

This is thus interesting for two reasons.  First, it's the first I've 
seen of backend discussions in a VERY long time.  Second, I /believe/ 
it's the first indication I've seen that you intend to develop any major 
new features or rewrite anything major on your own, we can call it "head 
developer", as opposed to an explicit "patches welcome" policy inviting 
others to do so (without doing any major features yourself, not that such 
a policy wouldn't continue even if you did), so they can be integrated, 
plus minor features and generally keeping pan working against current 
packages as the need for such (perhaps major, as likely with gnome-3) 
tweaking arises (which could be called "primary community maintainer", 
with "head maintainer" being the role Petr Kovar seems to be playing, 
now, either way).

Any other hints you care to drop, yet, or was even than an unintentional 
premature leak?

---
[1] Charles went silent for well over a year, IIRC it was over two and 
regulars were beginning to think pan might already be a dead package 
walking, before the announcement introducing pan2, some of that was no 
doubt early work on it, but I don't believe it all was.  Then he went 
great guns on pan for a bit over a year until pan2 worked reasonably 
well, then silent again, save for a single update 1 year later, until he 
started publicly posting requests for someone else to take over.

-- 
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