Re: [Pan-users] cached articles marked as read?

[Duncan]

Vito 'ZeD' De Tullio posted on Mon, 21 May 2012 20:02:36 +0000 as
excerpted:

> Hi.
> 
> I have a bad connection, and I want to automagically fetch all new
> headers + body of the newsgroup I subscribed.
> 
> I found at "Edit" -> "Edit preferences" -> "Actions" a way to cache new
> articles, settings the value "Only new (score == 0)" at the third drop
> down menu (labeled "Cache articles scoring at").
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, I found that the messages are also marked as read! If I
> do <shift>+a ("get new headers in subscribed news") I can see the layout
> pane with some new messages, but if I select a newsgroup I found no
> unread messages!
> 
> 
> Is this intentional? Is a bug? Is there a "correct" way to cache all new
> messages in all subscribed groups?

This is quite new code, this year, and hasn't had a lot of testing yet.  

"Old-pan", 0.14.x (the old C code, before the C++ rewrite) had what it 
called "rules", that allowed various automatic actions including mark-
read, delete, auto-cache, auto-download (plus some others like expiry 
that are handled entirely differently in the C++ rewrite) to be 
programmed based on scores, age of posts, etc.

Until this year (or perhaps late last year), that was about the only 
feature of old-pan that didn't have a corresponding new-pan version as 
well.  That changed with the introduction of actions.

But in the mean time, pan's long-time primary/lead developer and the 
person that undertook the rewrite in the first place, Charles Kerr, moved 
on to other things.  For many years pan development was all but 
abandoned, until KHalay and now Heinrich Mueller, along with Petr Kovar 
as release manager, keeper of the pan website and official Gnome 
representative, brought back pan from "the dead".  Heinrich's the guy who 
has taken the strongest interest in actually adding new features, 
including this one.  (I'm also a long-time pan guy as you can see by the 
history here, but I'm not a coder, so most of my activity is here on this 
list trying to contribute where my skills let me, and after around a 
decade at it with the original coders gone and new ones come, I've been 
described as pan's institutional memory, as well.)

Meanwhile, the reason no parallel to "rules" was committed to the rewrite 
back when Charles was still in charge was that he thought the way rules 
worked was too complex and confusing to configure (with some reason, we 
had a lot of questions on it, and I'd guess it was one of the least used 
features /because/ rules were so hard to work with, back then), and we 
needed a simpler interface to expose that automation.

There was some discussion of the idea back then that ended up with 
roughly the interface idea as currently implemented, and both Charles and 
I agreed that it was much easier and more intuitive to work with than the 
old rules interface.

Unfortunately, by that time Charles was losing interest and about to move 
on, and pan code sat basically abandoned for a couple years, the 
interface sort of decided but never implemented.

Which brings us almost to the present "new" implementation.  People kept 
asking for some way to automate such things, and personally, I always 
thought that ignored posts should at least be automatically marked read 
if not deleted, so when it came up again probably late last year, I again 
explained (as I had a number of times before) the GUI idea that had been 
discussed those several years ago, but that it had never been 
implemented...

Well, being the "lets stop wasting time and just code it" guy he is, 
Heinrich took that as an invitation to implement. =:^)  He's actually 
implemented quite a few new features as well, including the other long 
requested feature, binary uploading.  After all those long years waiting 
and discussing and explaining, I still have a hard time actually 
believing these features are actual reality, now, but they're still new 
enough not all the bugs have been worked out.

As to this actual feature, while I was the one who (re)described the 
interface and functionality as pan now implements it, I've not actually 
been active with binaries in years.  These days I mostly use pan on gmane, 
to follow various mailing lists such as this one, so my use is nearly all 
text, and with a reasonably good cable internet connection, I simply 
download messages on-demand, to read and reply to as necessary.

So while I (re)proposed the user interface and functionality, I've not 
actually tested it.  And I've not seen many other regulars mention it 
either.  So I'm not actually sure that the implementation actually works 
as intended.

You're really the first actual usage feedback I've seen on it!  That 
means you can help us fix it, tho I'm not yet sure whether it's the 
functionality that's not quite right, or whether it's not quite as 
intuitive as I (and whoever actually came up with the idea originally, it 
was long enough ago I'm honestly not sure if it was me or someone else) 
had hoped.

With that, the history's out of the way.  But my computer isn't quite 
stable these days, so let me send this before I crash, then I'll take a 
closer look at your actual question, and we'll see if it's your 
understanding that's not correct, or a bug in the still new 
implementation.  More coming!

-- 
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