[Pan-users] Re: How do I get a header count for all groups?

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 02 Sep 2007
01:43:41 +0000:

> I just fired up old pan and I found that Refresh Article Counts just
> uses the nntp GROUP command.  After grepping thru the new pan source
> code I'd say that the necessary code is already there, and it should be
> just a matter of adding that task to the popup menu in the groups pane.

> The fly in the ointment once again is the multiple-servers problem. 
> Each server will generally have a different number of articles in any
> given group, so Charles would need to add the code to poll each server
> for the selected groups and pick the largest count for each group.

If you've ever tried klibido, you know the nice fancy per-server and in 
general statistics it can do.  I've not tried it recently, but it was 
(and remains) a very useful multi-server binary harvester type news 
client, before the pan rewrite came on the scene, so there were bound to 
be some comparisons made.

For raw binary downloading power, complete with all sorts of activity 
graphs and the like, klibido beats pan N ways to Sunday, but that's all 
it does.  However, after reading various comments about it, Charles 
installed it for at least a trial run and took a look around.  From his 
comments, he was suitably impressed (especially considering the thing was 
~6 months old at the time, how long has pan been around and slowly 
developing?), and got quite a number of ideas for future ways pan could 
go in the area of feedback and statistics.

I use pan, however, because while it doesn't have all those bells and 
whistles for binary downloading, it does text and text posting too, what 
I spend the majority of my time in the groups doing, and does both them 
and binaries quite well enough that it's not worth my while keeping up 
another application.  Also, last I used it, while it was developing about 
as fast as pan did the first year after the rewrite (with all those 
weekly betas), it was as I mentioned simply a newer app, and as such, had 
some rather rough edges -- no filtering/scoring or the like, was one big 
one and the fact that I vastly prefer downloading to cache and then 
working from there to save stuff off, while it had only pan's default 
mode of downloading and saving files off directly (no working from 
cache), was another.  Otherwise I'd probably still have it installed and 
be using it for binaries.  Still, at the time klibido had been around 
only ~6 months and that was what, a year or more ago now, so it might be 
a pretty decent app by now, particularly at the speed it was developing.  
Then again, maybe he dropped interest and it has gone nowhere since 
then.  I simply don't know as I've not checked.

Anyway, regardless of whether you choose to continue using it regularly 
or not, if you do binaries, particularly if you do them on multiple 
servers, it's well worth installing at least for a trial run.  If nothing 
else, it's eye opening in terms of just what one /can/ do.  On a several 
megabit connection with enough news server resources to keep it running, 
it's as much fun simply watching it in action as it's downloading, as it 
is actually getting thru with the download and actually looking at your 
new content.  Quite a bit different experience than just sitting their 
watching the progress bars slowly inch forward, as can be the case with 
pan if you schedule big jobs.  Get enough eye candy and the download 
process itself can be entertaining.  It's really eye opening just how 
much work it's doing.  If pan could show half of what it's doing in the 
background as klibido does, people would be floored.  I know I was when I 
realized how much was going on in the background watching klibido.  It's 
truly a fascinating thing to watch.

So if you do get that C++ and gtk+ under your belt and are interested, 
certainly talk to Charles and see what sort of real-time stats and eye 
candy he'd be interested in.  I doubt he's interested in taking it as far 
as klibido did as the two products nicely demonstrate the target markets 
of GTK/GNOME vs KDE, simple and functional vs. gadget guru and control 
freak oriented, and pan's just not targeted at the same thing, but a bit 
more dynamic display while one is sitting there with little more to do 
than watch the progress trackers inch along would be nice.

(Interestingly enough, I just tried torrents for the first time recently, 
using ktorrent, and it's the same way.  It's great fun sitting there 
watching all the various real-time activity monitors while you're waiting 
for the download to finish.  Makes the wait MUCH less painful... and it's 
a nice incentive to keep the torrent going after you finish, as well, 
watching those upload to download ratios turn positive and grow. It 
wouldn't be half as much fun without all those graphs and activity 
monitor tables to watch!  =8^)

-- 
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