[Pan-users] Re: Re: 0.100 downloads marked as saved

[Duncan]

"Keith Richie" <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 18 Jun 2006 12:37:40 -0400:

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

> Thank's for being helpfull Richard.

Thank /you/.  =8^)
 
> Can you point me to future plans, as the mailing list archive searches
> in user and devel. didn't turnup anything for those 2 features.

You've probably looked and seen that it's not updated for the reality of
the >0.9x series yet, but there's a /very/ dated roadmap on the rebelbase
site.  I saw Charles was cleaning out the old Bugzilla bugs the other day,
maybe he'll get around to updating the roadmap soon too, and I'll have
something official to go on, instead of piecing a bit of a comment here
and a bit of a comment there together, and reading between the lines.  =8^\

As I said, Charles /has/ stated that there won't be many new features
until after 1.0. I have /inferred/ from various hints that he intends to
make 1.0 the next stable release, and to have it out by the end of the
year (I'm guessing he'd like it sooner, say August/Sept, but am saying EOY
as I think that's a safer bet, given I'm not sure).  Thus, unlike back
with 0.14.x, when "post 1.0" was really equivalent to "bluesky", that is,
"it'd be nice, but there's no telling if or when", post 1.0 actually
isn't that far away now that 1.0 should be the next stable release.

Beyond that, your "multiple groups view" idea has been discussed before,
back with the old PAN when the fully automated multi-server processing PAN
has now was still theory.  If you are familiar with BNR2 and 3 (which are
available for Linux, and have the code available under a more or less free
license, but require a slaveryware Borland Delphi/Kylex compiler, so I
won't use them as I have this thing about freedom, see), you'll see the
concept there.  The idea is sort of a "supernewsgroup", which combines the
posts from multiple groups into one view.  Of course, this wasn't possible
back then and was waiting on the multiple server thing, which was waiting
on the backend database rewrite (which of course pan >0.90 has, tho it's a
bit different than it was envisioned back then).  So, the prerequisites
are here now, and this feature will likely be added eventually, but as
it's a major new feature, it's almost certainly post 1.0.  If I were to
guess, I'd say perhaps 1.2 (or whatever 1.0 plus two stable releases ends
up being called), as 1.1 will likely be just getting back the rest of the
0.14 features still lacking (see next for more on that).

The save-an-nzb-file-to-subdir idea is really a special case or extension
of the 0.14.x idea of having each newsgroup save to a subdir of the
default save dir.  It has actually been requested recently (that is, in
discussions post 0.9x) both as the newsgroup subdir and specifically as
a per nzb subdir request.  Given that group-to-subdir was a feature in
0.14.x, the lack of it now is a regression, so that part is likely to be
dealt with fairly quickly.  However, as there's very little state retained
per group right now (only the absolutely necessary article tracking and
which groups are on which servers pretty much, AFAIK), all that per-group
state is likely to be added back at once, and Charles has hinted that it
will be post 1.0.  (Specifically, he told me that per group memory of
posting profile would be post 1.0, but again, that requires a mechanism to
store per group settings that doesn't yet exist, so reading between the
lines, the whole per-group-settings thing is post 1.0 -- but I could be
wrong.)  My guess would be that per-group setting and all the stuff that
logically follows will be pretty high priority post 1.0, very likely for
1.1, which I would assume to be the next-plus-one stable release, with a
very loosely guessed timetable of about this time next year (earlier if
1.0 goes out significantly b4 year-end).  After that, adding nzb subdir
support should be almost trivial, since behind the scenes that's what PAN
would already be doing for the group subdirs.  However, I'm not sure if
it'd be added at the same time or not.  I'd still say 1.1's a pretty good
guess, however.



-- 
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