[Pan-users] Re: Update to bug #129685

[Duncan]

Russell Wright posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Sun, 06 Feb 2005 23:36:45 -0600:

> I was wondering if there has been a fix published for this bug? I am on a
> brand new install of Mandrake 10.1 with Pan 0.14.2.91 and cannot seem to
> make any sort of headway in getting into my newsgroups for University of
> Phoenix.

First, please cut the HTML.  There's a reason PAN doesn't support it at
all.  (Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for Evolution users not even to
realize they are sending HTML, but I'm told it's easy to change once they
do realize it. =:^)

Unfortunately, the outlook (no pun intended <g>) isn't so good on this one.

Basically, development on PAN stopped for a year. The developers were to
busy with "real life", including stuff that paid "real money" <g>, to do
much with PAN.  There's been some resumed action over the last month or
six weeks, but no new versions yet.  .91 is still the latest.

(Thinking out loud here... At times I've wished someone with a few
thousand dollars to spare would sponsor a round or several of full time
PAN development. That seems to be what ultimately moves the big projects.
Unfortunately, newsgroups aren't generally a must-have for business users,
who prefer forums, mail, or instant mesaging, because those technologies
seem to be more popular with novices, so news hasn't gotten the same type
of sponsored support that the forms of messaging mentioned above have
received, and development of news clients on *ix has accordingly lagged...
Imagine the jump in PAN were it to get even six solid months of even one
half time developer working on it, let alone a year at full time.  I doubt
Charles would object either, if someone was willing to sponsor... <g>)

I'm not sure whether any progress has been made on the bug in CVS, tho I'm
guessing not, since it doesn't appear any testing server and account was
ever made available and there are no new notes on the bug.

In terms of future roadmap, from what Charles has mentioned, he intends to
put out a fairly quick 0.14.3 (which is what the .91 version was intended
to be a beta for), then switch to the major project of integrating the
work of K Haley and others on the SQLite back end, presumably to
eventually be released as 0.15.0. It will take some time to restabilize
PAN after that, during which bugs in that implementation will no doubt be
the focus, so unless they get testing access to a SPA server with the
problem implementation and find out the bug is easy to fix, it's not
likely to be fixed until late this year at the earliest, would be my
guess.  Because it's an enhancement, and again, if they don't get access
to such a testing server, it could well be longer than that.

As I said, the news isn't the best, but that's honest...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html