[Pan-users] Re: How's 0.112 working for you?

[Duncan]

Brian Pack <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 16 Sep
2006 14:04:59 -0400:

> [Charles Kerr wrote...]
>>Not very many bugs were reported this week, and most of them were
>>enhancement requests. Either 0.112 is working pretty well, or everyone's
>>burned out from the weekly betas.
> 
>>If it's the former, then RC1 should be the next release IMO.
> 
> It's been bugged before, but the not saving the group status and what
> has or hasn't been read until the app has closed is driving me batty.
> 
> I've gotten to the point where I simply cannot trust Pan to properly
> save it's status over an extended session.
> 
> I will download new headers, and immediately close Pan. Restart and read
> a few groups, then close. Restart then read a few more. Rinse, repeat.
> 
> If I know I'm going to go back and read a group later, I absolutely
> *must* close Pan before I go back and do anything else. I've lost count
> at how many times I've been browsing the 20th newsgroup of a session,
> only to have Pan crash without warning, and forgetting everything it's
> done over the last hour.
> 
> Am I mission a setting or something? Otherwise, this is a major
> showstopper for me.

You aren't missing a setting.  I've experienced the same problems and in
fact I believe it's my bug.  However, Charles says implementing state
saving could be a real drag on performance.

My view is it's going to be far better than forcing the user to constantly
worry about what he'll be losing in the event of a crash, and tracking his
usage to decide when it's time to manually close and restart pan. 
However, I'm not the one doing the coding, so...

A compromise would be to create two options, save settings when switching
groups, and save settings every 10 minutes (or 5 or whatever).  If the
user has a stable system, unchecking those options would avoid the
performance drag Charles is concerned about.  If the user sees
instability, checking one or both of the auto-save-settings options would
mitigate the problem.

It's worth pointing out that the instability isn't necessarily a pan
problem either.  It can be a system problem (as it was in my case for
awhile). However, pan's part of the system and has to work with whatever
stability issues the system might have in addition to those it itself
might have.

-- 
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