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

[Duncan]

Duncan posted on Tue, 22 May 2012 07:27:51 +0000 as excerpted:

> Duncan posted on Tue, 22 May 2012 06:37:19 +0000 as excerpted:
> 
>> Vito 'ZeD' De Tullio posted on Mon, 21 May 2012 20:02:36 +0000 as
>> excerpted:
>> 
>>> 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.

[History and ideal functional description deleted...]

> But if none of that's the problem I think I might know what is.  Next
> post...

As I mentioned, there's two very different routines for handing binaries, 
the direct-save-as-you-go method, which was pan's original design, and 
the pre-cache-to-go-thru-later method, which on a slow/bad connection 
where on-demand downloading of text doesn't work well, can be used for 
text, as well.

The pre-cache method was certainly for Charles NOT his primary way of 
working, thus the 10 MB default cache size which in new-pan until 
recently didn't even have a GUI config option, you had to directly edit 
the config file to increase it.  I don't actually know what the current 
devs use or if they do binaries at all (tho HM's quick addition of the 
binary uploading feature suggests he probably does at least a little of 
that), but direct-download-and-save would appear to continue to be the 
predominate method.

Which would leave pre-cache functionality less tested, at least at the 
first testing level, by the devs themselves.

Which brings us to what may be the issue.  For those who primary do 
direct-save, the pre-cache functionality is a bit of an afterthought.  
I'm quite sure it wasn't in the original "actions" proposal all those 
years ago, but as I used it myself, when I (re)proposed actions in the 
post that became the trigger for HM's implementation, I requested it.  Of 
course, that was only a few months ago and I've not actually done 
binaries in years, so I've not actually tested the new functionality to 
see how it compares against the proposal.

So here's what I suspect might be happening:

When HM did his implementation, he probably coded and tested the download-
and-save function first.  As you've likely observed, when you save 
attachments pan marks the post as read.

He then probably took the pre-cache code from the direct-save code, and 
just cut out the save.  I don't think I ever specified that the pre-cache 
action wasn't supposed to mark-read, as it didn't occur to me that it 
would.  And if he normally uses direct-save, not pre-cache, it probably 
didn't occur to him that pre-caching shouldn't mark-read as direct-save 
obviously did, so he didn't think to skip that bit when he skipped the 
save step on the pre-cache implementation.

That would be a bug, but as I said, this is a relatively new feature, one 
that I (re)requested but haven't actually tested as I haven't done 
binaries in years[1], so you're the first to report it.

Make sense?

----
[1] I keep trying to say I don't do binaries any more, but that's not 
quite right in the figurative sense even if it (currently) is in the 
literal, so I keep changing it to haven't done... .  It's not that I ever 
decided /not/ to.  It's simply that I /really/ enjoy text group 
discussion, and that and other things just gradually took the time that I 
had been doing binaries with.  Of course, now days ISPs don't generally 
provide news service like they used to, and I long ago let the paid 
subscription that I've occasionally carried drop, so the barrier to 
getting back into it is higher than it used to be, but I still /think/ of 
myself as a binary user, even if I've not done it in years and don't have 
a way to do it now without doing the whole account signup thing again.  
All I have now is the gmane list2news service, primarily text discussion 
of course, tho there's the occasional screen shot or whatever, where I do 
this list/newsgroup, among others.

If I /did/ get back into it, and I've been thinking about it, I'd 
probably go with one of those big unexpiring block accounts, say a TB for 
$100 or whatever (blocknews.net or astraweb.com, astra seems to have 1000 
gig for $50, now).  If I continued to do primarily text, that would 
likely hold me for life... or until the nntp services went the way of 
gopher servers, anyway.  It'd almost certainly last me well over a year, 
two and a half-ish even if I got back into the gig-a-day or so I used to 
do, making that a better choice than trying to do even a relatively cheap 
per-month thing.

-- 
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