[Pan-users] Re: <searching|reading> saved articles?

[Duncan]

Charles Sullivan posted on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 05:27:38 -0500 as excerpted:

> Older versions of PAN allowed you to create internal folders and save
> articles in them.  Clicking on a folder then displayed the articles
> saved in that folder just as if the folder were a newsgroup.
> 
> This feature was omitted in PAN version 2.  My opinion that this was one
> of the most useful features of PAN is apparently not shared by many
> others as requests for its restoration have fallen on deaf ears.

I wouldn't say "fallen on deaf ears" so much, as after the original just-
over one-year sprint with pan-0.90 thru 0.131, there's been little 
development at all.  0.132 and 0.133 were very minimal updates, mostly 
fixes to keep them compiling against the latest glib and other libraries, 
with the latest gcc, using patches already developed tested and deployed 
by the various distributions.  There were a couple other small patches, 
including one to properly add pan to the freedesktop.org standard menus, 
but no major new code at all.

Charles hasn't had a lot of time for development, so what has happened 
recently is that K Haley's community repository has been where the new 
patches are going, with a number of us running sources straight off his 
git repo.  After they're tested there some, Charles can pull them into 
the official git repo, and will ultimately create a 0.134 and there's 
talk of finally getting a 1.0.  But even that doesn't have, at this time, 
a lot of new features, mainly because nobody with the skills seems to be 
interested enough in the pan code to take the time to develop the patches 
and post them so khaley can incorporate them.  khaley doesn't seem to 
have the time to go to that level either, tho he does run a community 
repo and do patch integration, for which we're all grateful, as at least 
pan's being maintained at some level now, not almost abandoned.  But 
there's a big difference between maintaining current code, doing small 
bug fixes and incorporating patches as others create them, and actually 
having the skill and being willing to invest the time in coding major new 
features, which is what something like local storage folders would be.

Then there's the fact that the old implementation had a few notable bugs, 
one of which was that as pan tracks messages by message-id, in ordered to 
store copies of sent posts, it had to add a message-id before sending 
them, and then, it would know it already had that message so wouldn't 
download it again.  Thus it was impossible to see your message as it 
actually appeared on the server (the multiple pan instances feature would 
make it slightly possible now, but still too difficult to be practical), 
only as you sent it.  If it was mangled in transit, you, the poster, had 
absolutely no way of knowing that.

Personally, I'd rather have my posts downloaded along with all the others 
from the server, and see how they actually appear to others, than have 
the local folders feature but get that bug that came with the previous 
implementation as a result.

Also note that in the previous implementation, expiration was locked to 
that of the server.  New-pan allows you to set your own expiration.  
Here, I set no-expire and have posts going back several years, tho that 
does mean setting the cache size manually, directly in the config file, 
since there's no GUI for that and the default 10 MB would fill up quickly 
even with text-only.  Thus, it's possible to keep posts as they appear, 
directly in the groups in question, if desired, rather than having to put 
them in local folders, in ordered to save them.  That was the major 
reason for local folders before -- so you could keep stuff without having 
it expire when it did on the server.  That's no longer needed since 
expiry is entirely under user control now, and you can keep stuff 
indefinitely, directly in the newsgroup itself, if desired (and if you 
have disk space).

So (1) the biggest reason for local folders has disappeared, expiry is 
entirely under user control, and (2), we avoid various bugs by leaving 
the posts directly in the newsgroups they download to, instead of trying 
to do the local folders thing.  Together, that means there's both little 
need for the feature, and a discouragement for reimplimentation as it 
was, so it's little surprise that it has remained somewhere down below 
actual implementation priority, when people DO have the time to code up 
and test new features.  It's not deaf ears, it's a question of 
prioritizing all too rare real new-feature development time, on stuff 
that will really make a difference, without reintroducing the bugs of the 
previous version.

You are right, tho, in that not so many people really need local folders 
now, so the request level is lower, because the real necessity of it in 
terms of having a place to keep messages where they wouldn't expire is 
now gone.

-- 
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