Re: [Pan-users] "name as subject"

[Duncan]

On Mon 10 Feb 2003 04:50, Danny Rathjens posted as excerpted below:
> Gah!, I just upgraded to 0.13.3 and the option to save based on the
> article subject name has been removed, but I can find no reference
> to this in the changelogs or mailing list archive except one post
> from a user complaining about the 'save article as' dialog being
> confusing and being told to design a new one.
>
> Was that the motivation to remove this very useful feature?
> If that's the case, can we have a setting for newbie vs expert menu
> options?(or braindead vs literate, if you want to look at it that way, ;)
>
> Or is there some way I can still do this and I am just missing it
> (keystrokes)?

I'd never noticed it disappeared, until now.  I guess that shows how much I 
used it.  <g>  Same would apply to most of the others on the list, I assume, 
as I don't recall seeing it there, either.  I do remember it from b4, and had 
a vague feeling, on occasion, that the save as dialog was missing something, 
but never bothered to figure out what.

There was a specific, and a more general reason for removing the feature.  
Charles, to his credit and that of the other coders, has been pretty good at 
controlling code bloat and featuritis.  If features are rarely used, they are 
candidates for removal, keeping PAN lean and mean, and code maintanance and 
debugging that much simpler.  That is a GOOD thing.  Occasionally, he finds 
he removes something he THOUGHT was little used, and it causes howls of 
dismay.  In a revision or two, they get put back.  (The single click selects 
vs activates option, and having a separate option for the overview vs group 
panes is a good example.)  Others cause a squak from one or two folks, but 
nothing major, and they may not get put back.  This is obviously an example 
of the latter, alto I can see how it would be a quite useful feature on 
occasion, and may eventually get put back (see below).  That's the general 
reason.

More specifically, Charles had the goal of porting PAN to MSWormOS.  It seems 
to be working there, now, in beta at least, but to get it there with the 
least trouble, the choice was made to cut features requiring the larger Gnome 
libraries (a good thing on *ix installations not running Gnome as well), and 
stick with the bare minimums, basically GTK, and GNET (the move to GNET was 
in part to facilitate the MSWindows port, but it had other advantages as 
well).  The original file dialogs, as welll as some other features, depended 
on Gnome, AFAICT, and were removed if considered non-vital, or recoded if 
considered vital, to kill that dependence.  This particular feature hasn't 
been recoded yet, it would seem.

That's the story as I gather it from the various discussions on the list, 
anyway.  I think I do recall a discussion about more advanced file dialogs 
returning at some point.  Perhaps now would be a good time.  I can't speak 
for him or the other coders, however, except to say that I doubt he'd turn 
down a patch implementing such functionality, if it's something you can do.

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin