Re: [Pan-users] Feature requests

[Chris Petersen]

> >  Since we're talking about download options, I'd like to be able to 
> > auto-sort
> >  the queue by date posted. If you've got a server with a shortish
> >  retention, this would give you the best chance to get everything you
> >  wanted.
> That would certainly be an option if you're trying to get some messages
> which are about to be expired.

I think this is an awesome idea..   anything to help avoid missing 
downloads is great iun my book.

> The other issue would in my opinion best be served by using some kind of
> priority system. First priority would be foreground downloading, second
> background, third would be the end of the queue.

I think this has been the main idea all along.  the question is how to 
institute that priority....

Personally, I'm a big fan of pausing downloads to grab higher-priority 
things (what you call foreground downloading).  But as I'm not familiar 
with the disadvantages of pausing downloads (I've occasionally run into 
issues when trying to restart them, and lost the download, requiring me to 
redownload the entire header list because pan stopped displaying the 
chunks of the article that were already downloaded - but this may have 
been fixed in recent versions), the coder(s) should probably decide 
whether or not this is a good idea, even if more users think it's cool (It 
would essentially eliminate the need for the "reserve" slot, which would 
be cool)...

As for the other ideas suggested (sort-by-date and other priority-shaping 
tools), it seems that it would be possible to create some kind of 
user-editable list in the prefs to control how newly-specified downloads 
should sort themselves into the queue (since doing this any other time 
would make it difficult to continue allowing manual modification of the 
queue, which is nice)...

On this note, I would like to suggest that maybe the "get new articles 
for group.name" task should check to see if one with the same name is 
already in the queue.  (I have other issues with the behavior of this 
particular task, but they're off-topic so I'll post them later in their 
own thread)...

-Chris