Re: [Pan-users] Pan still resizing its newsgroups panel?

[Duncan]

Izak van Langevelde posted on Tue, 28 Aug 2018 18:40:41 +0200 as
excerpted:

> It's been a while since I issued a bug report on pan spontaneously
> resizing its newsgroups panel. It is extremely annoying.
> As of pan 0.145 , the problem still persists. Is there a more recent
> version around, or a practical workaround, or do I better trash this
> newsreader and look for an alternative?

FWIW, while I've not seen pan resizing its /groups/ pane, I know of a 
similar long-standing bug that can be rather irritating, where the 
columns in the headers pane all reset to 1 pixel wide, leaving the last 
column (scores for me) taking the whole space in the list.  I'm guessing 
your bug is likely a different manifestation of the same root bug.

The admittedly rather technical workaround I did for the header-pane-
columns-resize bug is create a pan starter script that looks in 
preferences.xml where those sizes are stored, and rewrites the lines in 
question (actually, using 0-context-line patch) to my preferred width in 
pixels if they are zero.

What this means in practice is that if I see the bug appear (it seems to 
happen on the first pan start after an upgrade of pan or gtk, not every 
time, and not on /every/ upgrade either), I simply quit and restart pan, 
with the 1-sized columns being written out to the preferences file when I 
quit, and rewritten/patched back to my preferred sizes when I restart, 
after which I'm good until some upgrade triggers the bug again.

A less technical version of the same workaround would be simply setting 
the preferences.xml file (with the desired settings) read-only, or if 
that doesn't work, saving a copy of preferences.xml with the desired 
settings, and copying it over the file pan actually uses before startup, 
probably in a startup script.

Without more details on the bug (since you reported it, a link to the 
bugzilla URL would be nice) it's difficult to say whether there's a 
similar workaround for your case, but there are some things I'd try:

* Pan lets you change the layout.  You might try putting the groups pane 
on the right instead of the left, and see if it helps.

* Pan has a tabbed as well as a paned layout.  View > Layout > Tabbed-
Layout.  A tab taking up (nearly) the entire window shouldn't have the 
resize problem, tho obviously that's a drastic enough change it'll take 
some major changes to your workflow to accommodate it.

* You can keep the paned layout, and try simply toggling the show-group-
pane setting (under view > layout).  Assigning a hotkey to it should make 
it easier.  This is very likely the workaround I'd use here /because/ the 
hotkey toggling should make it reasonably easy, and I'm already used to 
using hotkeys to toggle other settings (show only unread vs. all posts, 
show all headers vs. normal message display, etc).

* You can try the patching or read-only/copying-from-backup trick I 
mentioned above.  I believe the preferences.xml lines you'd want to edit/
patch are the main-window-hpane-position and/or main-window-hpane-
position lines.

* Given that I've not seen the bug, it's possible it's related to one of 
the libraries pan depends on.  If your pan is built against gtk2, try 
building against gtk3, if gtk3, try building against gtk2, and see if 
that affects your bug.  (For a long time there were known bugs when pan 
was built against gtk3 and gtk2 was recommended.  Some of them have been 
fixed relatively recently gtk3 is in better shape now, but it's possible 
there are others.  FWIW, my pan is still built against gtk2, as is 
gentoo's, and AFAIK fedora's, given the note in the gentoo ebuild that 
they're following fedora on that.)


As for a more recent version, 0.145 is pretty recent, but there's always 
the live-git version, which I and some others here run, checking for 
updates every week or so and rebuilding if there are updates.  (FWIW, I 
run live-git kde/plasma as well, on gentoo, using the live-git ebuilds in 
the gentoo/kde overlay and a live-git pan ebuild I've used here, 
occasionally updating sometimes with help, for years.  The update checks 
and rebuilding on new commits is pretty well automated.)  Tho if 0.145 
doesn't have it, chances are the git version doesn't either, as 0.145 was 
only announced back in May and there haven't been /that/ many commits 
(other than language updates) since.


As for alternatives, your options depend on your OS of choice and what 
you use pan for (not all do yenc, essential for binary downloading but 
not something primarily text users are likely to be worried about, for 
instance), but from what I've seen, fewer people are doing NNTP anything 
these days and there's fewer still active nntp clients available as a 
result, so I believe options are unfortunately more limited than they 
were say a decade ago.  Still, you should have some.

-- 
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