Re: [Pan-users] Bye bye pan 0.14, what's next for pan 0.1xx?

[Duncan]

George Czerw posted on Wed, 09 May 2012 13:07:04 -0400 as excerpted:

> On Wednesday, May 09, 2012 11:30:20 am Maurice Batey wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:09:30 +0100, I wrote:
>> > No doubt the day will come when I shall have to make the change...
>> 
>> Having installed the 64-bit Mageia-2 Beta3, I find that 'old' Pan will
>> not install (though no problem with the 32-bit Mageia).
>> 
>> Seems old Pan depends on 32-bit lib's that 64-bit Mageia doesn't have.
>> 
>> So I installed 'new' Pan, in the hope it might facilitate some kind of
>> import from my .pan directory - or even just adopt it (as .pan2)!
>> 
>> No such luck. The only clue to Import was a reference under 'File' to
>> 'NZB' files.   What are they?
>> 
>> Do I really have to ditch the .pan setup and start all over from
>> scratch?
> 
> Maurice
> 
> If I recall correctly, when I first installed "new" pan, all that I did
> was to let it hook up to a news-server, download a list of news groups
> and select the same groups that I had been using.  Then I just copied
> over the article-cache, article-drafts and groups directories into .pan2

This is generally correct, except that IIRC the groups dir formats 
changed too.

Pan2 uses many more standardized formats for various things (like the nzb 
file format for the tasks tracking file, and for manual nzb file loading 
as well, see the wikipedia nzb entry, as already mentioned), and more 
memory efficient formats for other things.

* The articles are still plain text in the cache and as saved.  That 
hasn't changed, so if you're like me and have a huge cache set (gigs, not 
the 10-meg pan default), you can just copy that over and it'll work.  Do 
note that until recently, tho, pan2 didn't have a cache-size setting in 
the GUI, it had to be configured manually.  (That was part of Charles'/
Gnomes' constant dumb-down-the-gui-to-almost-useless efforts.  
Fortunately pan/charles never went as far as much as gnome often does.)  
But if anything, Heinrich might be accused of leaning the other way and 
gui config options have proliferated.  Suits this kde desktop because 
it's more configurable user just fine, but the folks who like gnome for 
its dumbed-down-ness won't be happy.  Of course these days even fewer 
such folks than before use newsgroups, so...

* The scorefile is still the same /basic/ format, but it's MUCH stricter 
now.  Previously, group/section names could be regex format.  Now they 
must be * wildcard format or literal as that's what the original standard 
was (the regex groupnames was a variant used by a different news client, 
xnews, not the original slrn format).  If you hand-edit your scorefile I 
can provide additional details, but I'll skip it for now as you may not 
use that anyway.

* The newsgroup subscription and read-message tracking files are still 
standard newsrc format and should be directly transferable (with a simple 
rename), except that the newsrc standard assumed single-server, and pan's 
now transparent multi-server, with a separate newsrc file for each server.

Everything else is changed.  With things like the preferences and 
servers.xml files, it's because of changes like the transparent multi-
server handling that means there's more different settings than ones that 
could have stayed the same, so it really didn't make sense to keep the 
same format for the few settings from old-pan that still made sense.  
With things like the group files, etc, pan's storage of them was reworked 
to be more memory efficient.  Huge groups still challenge it, especially 
on 32-bit, but it'll handle millions of individual articles per group as 
opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands, now.  And as mentioned, pan's 
native tasklist format is standard nzb now, instead of its own pan 
specific thing.

Meanwhile, last I tried, old-pan still *RAN* fine on 64-bit.  I kept the 
binary around for years, so I could run it to refer to when I needed to 
answer questions about it.  But at some point I realized that I hadn't 
had a question on it in like two years or more and nobody (?) was still 
shipping it so by that point the only folks using it would be those 
already very familiar with it, so little chance of additional questions, 
and I decided to delete both it and the local config I had saved for it 
as well.

But as old as that code is, even on x86 (32), I'd be surprised if it 
actually built with a modern gcc against a modern gtk2 and system, 
without patching.  Maybe it does, but I'm surprised.  I'd have expected 
it to require an old gcc 3.x or the like, and possibly older gtk2, etc, 
as well.

So it may indeed still run if you already have a binary; I know amd64 did 
here as of a couple years ago or so anyway, but building it is a 
different matter.

-- 
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