[Pan-users] Re: Old Pan: Cannot see newsgroup 'read' items before March 11

[Duncan]

Maurice <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 15 Aug
2008 18:01:27 +0100:

> On Thursday 14 August 2008 23:52:06 Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
>> keep in mind that new Pan does *not* save copies of your sent posts.
> 
> Does anyone know of a newsreader that does not throw away ones own
> postings and others' postings that you have deliberately kept for
> future use?

Steven's assertion about new-pan is correct -- and isn't correct, 
depending on the viewpoint.  Let's see if I can clarify...

The correct bit is that new-pan (unlike old-pan) doesn't save off your 
own posts before they are sent.  If they don't show up on the server, 
that therefore means you don't have a copy of them.

However, once they get to the server, unlike old-pan [see below 1], new-
pan treats them like any other message.  You download them like you would 
any other message, and they expire like any other message.

That means that if you set do-not-expire, all downloaded messages 
including your own... don't expire.  You then delete messages if you 
like, and keep messages if you like.  If you want to keep all your own 
messages as downloaded, just the same as if you want to keep anyone 
/else's/ messages as downloaded, there's nothing stopping you from doing 
so, other than disk space, as long as you have no-expire set, and a 
sufficiently large cache set.

[1]  One of the problems with old-pan turned out to be that for your own 
messages, you /always/ saw the copy of the message pan saved as you sent 
it.  Old-pan simply didn't download your messages, since it already had a 
copy.  It would always display the copy it had, and there was no way to 
see the message as the server got it and served it to others.  There was 
thus no way (using pan) to catch an upload-corrupted post, since the view 
the poster got was always the pre-send view.  Additionally, there was no 
way to see what additional headers the server might be adding, since old-
pan always displayed the pre-send message.

Obviously, this presented problems of its own.  With new-pan, while you 
don't [automatically, see below 2] get a pre-send copy of everything you 
post, you get a copy of your own posts along with everything else when 
you download.  You therefore get a copy of the post as everyone else 
downloading from that server gets it, including any corruption or server-
added headers.  What you do with the post after you download it is then 
left up to you.

[2] Meanwhile, if you DO want to save off a copy of the message pre-send, 
new-pan has a new pair of features, the save-draft and open-draft 
features.  As with the draft feature in most other programs, it allows 
you to save a working copy, shutdown pan or do whatever, then come back 
to it later, opening the draft to send or continue working on.

The draft feature simply works as a pre-send file-save/file-open option.  
It opens the file-dialog and allows you to browse the filesystem, saving/
opening a file from anywhere your user has access to.  While it opens in 
a subdir of pan's working dir (~/.pan2 by default, article-drafts being 
the subdir), you can browse the filesystem and open/save a file anywhere 
you normally could.  Unlike some draft implementations I've seen, opening 
the draft does NOT delete the file off of disk.

It's thus possible to save any posts you'd like to, pre-send, by using 
the save-draft function, then sending it as usual.  It's just not 
automated, as it only saves the ones you tell it to.

It'd be nice to have an option to automate the process so it saved a pre-
send copy of every post you sent, automatically, and perhaps that'll be a 
future feature.  However, it doesn't have the automated pre-send save 
option presently.  Meanwhile, new-pan doesn't treat your own posts 
differently than any others when downloaded (except that you have the 
match only my articles option under the view, header pane menu, if you 
want to use it), so if you have set no-expire and have a large enough 
cache set so it's not deleting posts (bodies) due to that, and you aren't 
deliberately deleting your posts, you'll have copies of them as they 
appeared on the server, thus giving you the choice of having pre-send 
(using the draft feature) or post-download copies of your posts, as you 
wish.

Hope that clarifies things.  Perhaps with said clarification, new-pan 
will fill your needs after all.

-- 
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