[Pan-users] Re: Read or save attachements - number of lines

[Duncan]

"Styma, Robert E \(Robert\)"
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:21:09 -0500:

>    It appears that at just about 5000 lines of article, clicking
> once on an article goes into "save as" mode instead of read the article
> mode.  If I right click and select read article from the popup, it works
> fine.
>    I would like to bump the 5000 line number up to an artibitrarily
> large number so it does not go into "save as" mode.  I have not found a
> preference which would do this.

The thing is it's not a set number of lines, but rather, whether the 
article is multi-part or single-part.  (Actually, I think pan may now 
automatically view it if multi-part is low enough, 2-3, but am not sure.  
It certainly asks to save if it's say 10 parts.)

The idea is that, particularly for those still on dialup, accidentally 
telling pan you want to "preview" a message that may take an hour to 
download would be rather irritating!  Thus, the auto-save-as dialog 
serves as a warning that it's a multipart post that could be big enough, 
particularly on a slow connection, that you don't actually /want/ to 
download and view it.

Now that you bring it up, however, I do think it'd be nice to have a 
preference for that somewhere, so those on faster links that want to can 
set say 10 parts, or whatever, instead of just one, before it kicks into 
save-as mode.

However, there is a way to work around it, and it's actually the way I 
tend to use pan for binaries, for that and other reasons.  I tend to 
download to cache, go do something else (go to work or to bed), and come 
back when pan's done downloading (when I get off work, or when I 
wakeup).  Then I can work with everything already local, using the info 
in the posts themselves (title, author, date posted, any nfo notes) to 
decide where I'm going to store the files, if I decide I do want to save 
them permanently.

The trick to downloading to cache, however, is that you must set pan's 
cache size to something large enough that it keeps it all around long 
enough for you to process it later.  I have a 12 gig dedicated partition 
(well, logical volume, but partition in normal parlance) set aside for 
pan cache, and use it all.  The setting is considered "advanced" however, 
and is thus not found in the GUI, but must be changed by editing 
preferences.xml manually (in pan's config and data dir, by default 
~/.pan2/).  Do a search on "cache-size-megs".  The default is 10, which 
is way too small for download to cache and process later, at least for 
binaries.

There are a few other "advanced" settings that are similarly unavailable 
in the GUI.  For instance, in servers.xml, you can set expiration to any 
arbitrary number of days, instead of being limited to the few choices in 
the GUI, and can set >4 connections to your servers, if they allow them.  
(Four is the max in the GUI due to GNKSA guidelines, but some pay servers 
in particular specifically allow more.)  You can also change where pan 
looks for its config and data files by setting the PAN_HOME environmental 
variable to an appropriate path.  This is handy for those of us who like 
to have multiple pan instances, with some of the settings different for 
each.  I have a text instance, a test instance, and a binary instance, 
but heavy binary users may have a movies instance, an mp3 instance, and a 
pr0n instance, just to give two examples.  I simply created little 
starter scripts that set this and a couple other vars appropriately, and 
put entries in my menu for them, replacing my standard pan menu entry.

BTW, I'm assuming pan 0.1xx, not the older pan 0.14.x, which is rather 
different in many ways.  Next time, please mention your version number, 
as it does simplify things and eliminate confusion. =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