[Pan-users] Big Pan code commit

[Charles Kerr]

I've just checked in code to Pan that uses nonblocking communication 
with the news server rather than the previous blocking, 
one-thread-per-communication model.  As a result Pan is no longer a 
threaded application ("threads" as in pthreads, not article threading), 
so I was also able to remove about a thousand lines of now-unnecessary 
pthread code.

Removing pthreads is the big-hammer way to get rid of pthread bugs, so 
this should make for a more intrinsically stable Pan once any new-code 
bugs are stomped out.

The new code's worked fine for me for the last week of testing under 
normal use (setting up new accounts, fetching group lists, new headers, 
reading articles, posting, and decoding binaries), so I've checked it in 
for wider testing.  If anyone's interested, please give it a spin from CVS.

For those keeping track, this is the biggest checkin to Pan in the last 
year.  We're not quite dead yet...

Oh, and the GNet prerequisite's been dropped too.

cheers,
Charles