[Pan-users] Re: Feature request: add port to servers, label servers for use with localhost

[Duncan]

Phil <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 02
Jan 2008 12:07:56 -0800:

> Also: I guess I'm not the only one to say it, but expanding Pan to post
> binary attachments might be nice too.  Seems to be a big disadvantage
> vis a vis XNews etc etc.  Other than these things, I like Pan very much.

That's been on the todo list "forever", and at this point, seems likely 
to stay that way.

Several years ago, one of the betas actually had a (not-yet-working) UI 
interface for posting single-piece binaries, but Charles yanked it out 
again.  He apparently wasn't satisfied with it, as it didn't handle multi-
parts nor do stuff like par, etc.

IMO, however, long before this point, the perfect has become the enemy of 
the good.  "Trivial" (that is, single part) binary posting would be far 
better than what we have now, and the usual answer, to use newspost or 
the like, could remain, for batch-posting.

Meanwhile, I hacked up a method to use pan's external editor feature to 
post "trivial" attachments with.  For technical reasons (the external 
editor not getting access to the headers, new-pan not allowing arbitrary 
8-bit in the edit window on return from the external editor), it's rather 
limited, but it works for "identity", that is, simply copying in the text 
of a file, not attachment per se, and uuencoding, at least.  With old-pan 
it worked (from my tests) with yEnc as well, but the rewrite changed the 
way the edit-window works, so it won't work with yEnc either, leaving 
only UUE.

It's bash script, and available in two versions, both requiring uudeview 
be installed to handle the actual encoding.  The first version only 
requires that but was a very rough proof of concept, so is quite 
difficult to use (no UI of its own, it works by scanning for keywords in 
the text copied to it).  As such, it's available but it's unlikely I'll 
ever do further updates on it.  The second version uses kdialog, part of 
kdebase, for a UI.  It's far easier to use, but non-KDE-users may not 
want the dependency.  A number of folks have used this version, however, 
with a couple feeding back patches (which I have yet to incorporate, but 
likely will at some point).

pan-attach (first version) and pan-attach-kd.  For more info, download 
and either look at them with an editor, or just set them executable and 
run them from a terminal window.  If run without parameters or with
--help, they'll spit out the expected help, including instructions.

http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/

-- 
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