Re: [Pan-users] Pan downloads few images at at time

[Duncan]

Hendrik Boom posted on Mon, 27 Feb 2017 19:28:00 +0000 as excerpted:

> Pan seems to download only three images at a time.  If I want to
> download, say, imgges from a series of say 30 articles, I highlight
> them,
> request download, and it downloads three of them.  I can highlight
> again,
> and get the next three.
> 
> I'm not asking for concurrency -- I'm asking it not to stop at three.
> I'd be happy with just one at a time, even slower, even with pauses
> between downloads, as long as it keeps plugging away and doesn't give
> up.
> 
> It used to work a while ago.
> 
> Has this been fixed long ago and I just have an obsolete Pan?  Or is it
> just misconfigured?
> 
> I'm using Pan 0.139 on Devuan linux (Jessie).

Well, your pan is old (you can see from my headers what live-git-pan was 
as of... February 6, when I last checked for updates), but what you are 
describing hasn't /ever/ been pan normal behavior, that I know of (with a 
decade and a half of pan experience, from the old gnome-1-based version 
back in 2001/2002), so there's something else going on.

Is anything showing up in the log (the status icon to the bottom right 
should be clickable)?  What NSP (new-service-provider)?  Maybe they have 
some cap on data or time limit per download/connection?

Note that it could be the libraries pan is built against as well.  Is 
that pan built against gtk2 or gtk3?  I know the recommendation has been 
to build against gtk2, as that's what most of those (like me) building 
pan themselves and distro maintainers in the know do, so it gets the most 
testing, and at least at one point there were some pretty strange bugs 
reported against pan when built against gtk3, that simply disappeared 
when it was built against gtk2.  Additionally, there are known problems 
with pan running against certain gmime versions.

Finally, there have been a number of patches fairly recently that keep 
pan working correctly when built with a quite recent gcc, due to g++ now 
defaulting to newer standards.  Without those patches pan will misbehave 
when built with newer gcc unless specific build options are used, but 
I'd /guess/ that if you're running a distro with that old a pan, it's 
running a fairly old gcc as well, and that shouldn't be an issue.


Meanwhile, if you're running pan with nntps connections, you _definitely_ 
want to update, as there was a bug in pan's certificate handling back 
then, such that it didn't store certificates properly.  As a result, you 
either had to manually accept it each time, or check the option to have 
pan always accept it regardless of whether it had changed or not, which 
of course means it'd be reasonably trivial to MitM (man-in-the-middle) 
attack those connections as the MitM cert would be accepted 
automatically.  Of course if you're running only plain-text nntp 
connections anyway (which you will be automatically if pan wasn't built 
with secure-connection support in the first place, something that debian 
was choosing to omit in their build due to now cured lgpl2/lgpl3 
licensing issues for awhile, but one would hope they're enabling it now 
that those are fixed), that's not an issue you need to worry about as 
anyone in the middle can read anything they care to look at regardless.

-- 
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