[Pan-users] Re: Turning off warning about long signature

[Duncan]

Danita Zanre posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below, 
on Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:20:55 -0700:

> I work on the Novell support newsgroups, and have a bit of "FAQ"
> information in my signature - for those newsgroups this is considered
> acceptable :)
> 
> Is there a way to turn off the warning that my signature is longer than 4
> lines and some lines are longer than 80 characters (long URLs I guess).

No, not just from the configuration, anyway.  The PAN developers are
(rightly) quite proud of the fact that PAN is 100% GNKSA compliant.  GNKSA
says in part:

<quote>

14) Try to respect the 80-character line-length conventions

[]

It's also a good idea to warn the user if the article she is about to
post contains non-header lines longer than 80 characters.  The software
SHOULD NOT prevent the posting, but SHOULD ask whether the user wants to
re-edit or post anyway.

[]

15) Separate signatures correctly, and don't use excessive ones

[]

Hence, posting software SHOULD prevent the user from using excessively
long signatures, or at least warn the user against it.  A widely
accepted standard is the so-called McQuary limit: up to 4 lines, each up
to a maximum of 80 characters.

</quote>

PAN's development philosophy has always been that the GNKSA standards,
both the SHOULDs and the MUSTs, WILL be observed, in PAN as publicly and
officially distributed.  That's a non-negotiable for the publicly
distributed version.  Thus, while the warnings are just that, WARNINGS,
allowing one to ignore them and post anyway, the officially distributed
version does not and will not contain a way to disable those warnings.

That said, PAN is of course freedom software.  Source code is available,
and the user is empowered to make any changes (s)he wishes.  A user may
even choose to distribute so-modified works, provided the source to the
modification is also made available in accordance with the GPL v2 under
which PAN itself is licenced.  Thus, users who don't like the GNKSA
features may choose to disable them as they wish, in the source code
itself, and then recompile said code into a new binary executable. 
Charles has always encouraged this, and even helpfully pointed out at
times where in the source a specific function may be found so as to
disable it, if desired.

-- 
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