[Pan-users] Re: ANN: Pan 0.14.1 - "This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity."

[Duncan]

Meaty posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on
Thu, 28 Aug 2003 11:21:42 -0400:

> I'd like to see a way to turn OFF the warnings for mostly quoted text,
> more than 80 lines, and not setting up followups for crossposting.
> I've been posting to Usenet going on 8 years and I'm really annoyed by
> these warnings. Other than the warnings and the new scoring filters,
> PAN is a good reader.

The warnings shouldn't be annoying to someone posting generally netiquette
observing posts, because they shouldn't be getting them.  If they DO get
them, such folks are generally appreciative of the warning, as they don't
normally intend to violate generally observed netiquette.  I know I
certainly am!

Seriously, those warnings are a product of the hard work PAN developers
put in to make it GNKSA compliant.  (See the PAN web site as linked in the
about dialog for a link to more details on GNKSA.)  That compliance was
and remains a major goal of PAN, and any changes to the officially
distributed version negating such compliance, as you suggest, would be
considered a bug, and rightly so, IMO.

Two points, then. One, PAN is open source.  While the officially
distributed versions aren't going to be removing such warnings any time
soon, feel free to get the source and make your own changes as necessary
to remove them for yourself.  Further, feel free to fork PAN and
distribute a version called POT or KETTLE or whatever, if you so desire. 
That's allowed by the terms of the license under which PAN is distributed,
as long as you make the source to your changes available as well if you
publicly distribute the binaries.  However, don't expect such changes to
make it back into the official PAN source, or for any encouragement, altho
Charles is always willing to helpfully point out as he already has where
the code is in the source, if you wish to make the changes.

Two, given that a major priority of PAN and its developers is to maintain
GNKSA compliance at the 100% level, if you as a user aren't comfortable
with PAN, perhaps PAN isn't your ideal personal news client choice.  There
are plenty of others out there that are happy to stomp all over netiquette
if the idea of actually encouraging politeness annoys some users.  You
will probably find they are better suited to the way you use your news
client.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin