[Pan-users] Pan needs some serious fixing

[Horacus Horacus]

Ok, I've started using Pan as an alternative to Agent on Windows, at least  
I attempted to, but must say my results were very dissappointing.
Installing Pan requires for some reason that gtkspell thing, and that by 
itself took me over an hour to work out to sattisfy the missing lib, Pan 
wouldn't even start without it ( I installed the 12.9 rpm for Mandrake).
Since I've had a lot of experience working out the dependency crap and 
hunting down libs I manage but I can't see less experienced users ever 
succed without some serious time and effert investment. If I wasn't so 
stubborn I wouldn've given up on Linux and it's library dependency crap long 
time ago.
But back to Pan.
The main problem I have with Pan is that it fails misserably in downloading 
multipart binary posts. If I flag a post and then say "downlad flaged" it 
only retreaves the first part and only starts retreaving the rest of the 
parts when I choose to save the binary to disk. I have not tried to expand 
the multipart binary post into it's individual parts yet and see if it'll 
work then but I shouldn't have to do that. This is a basic feature and 
should work flawlessly!
The other problem that made me reboot from Linux and go do my News stuff in 
Windows/Agent after a few hours of struggling is that when working in tabbed 
layout, and selecting an already downloaded article, it will keep coming to 
this first article in the article window and not to a newly selected, 
different article. Only by double clicking an article will it display a 
correct article in the article tab. So, the way it should work, is when I 
click an article in the headers tab to select it, and then click the article 
tab, Pan should display the article that was selected, just like Agent on 
Windows does. That's the whole point of having the tab layout! Without that 
functionality the tab layout is only usefull for viewing lists in expaned 
manner.
I have not tried to post any binary attachments with Pan yet but from 
reading the mailing list I understand this feature is somewhat limited right 
now?
Well, at least Pan lists the news posts with binaries in a somewhat useable 
manner as opposed to Knode, which is totaly useless for any binary news 
usage because it download everything I click (and that can be a problem when 
there is a 15mb binary attachent as is the case in many video and audio 
groups, lol).
Anyway, enought of my rant. Good job with Pan otherwise.

Horacus




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