[Pan-users] I'm back! Was: can you run Pan 2 on anything but GNOME/Linux? (and how to donate?)

[Duncan]

Lacrocivious Acrophosist via Pan-users posted on Wed, 19 Aug 2020 01:22:53
+0000 as excerpted:

> Unfortunately we appear to have lost the individual embodying our
> Institutional Memory, Duncan. His last posts are from 2018 and, given
> his devotion to Pan over so many years and his somewhat loquacious (I
> should talk! Glass houses, etc.) posts to help users, I don't find it
> credible that he simply lost interest. I suspect, without any evidence
> save his absence, that Duncan has gone on to that Great Newsgroup In The
> Sky.

So I'm back.  Luckily or unluckily, not on that Great Newsgroup in the 
Sky just yet!  =:^)

... and this is a reasonable first-reply-back, to announce it.  Some may 
wonder what happened and be interested in the story below, submitted 
FWIW...

The original problem was gmane's list2news service, which I had used to 
follow my mailing lists with.  It... or rather, the gmane.org address, 
disappeared.  Because it had had some hiccups previously but always came 
back, I expected that at first and of course was a bit busy to 
investigate when I thought it'd be back, then eventually figured gmane 
was gone for good.

Like a year or year and a half later I found a hint somewhere that the 
guy/company that was supposed to take over the web side and had taken 
over the gmane.org DNS as well, had lost interest, and when its DNS went, 
it took the DNS for the list2news service with it, but that Lars had 
moved it to another domain.  Unfortunately I didn't track the web page 
where I read it and lost the info on the new gmane domain.

And since my ISP had dropped news and I wasn't using the block account 
much, gmane had been my only regular news usage, so with it gone I really 
wasn't using pan either, tho I did keep it installed and loading, for the 
day I'd eventually get back to it.

Meanwhile, I thought about switching to regular email.  But pan's lists 
were the only thing I was *really* motivated to do it for, and since I 
was only doing news with gmane and it had disappeared, there wasn't 
really a reason to bother.

Of course in the while pan lost its maintainers and without upstream 
updates or local usage, it gradually bitrotted, and my distro, gentoo, 
recently dropped it.  But gentoo's build-from-source and I had a local 
live-git ebuild for it, so I wasn't immediately affected by their drop on 
its own.  But the reason they dropped it was that it was no longer 
building against new libraries and they judged it dead upstream (only 
translation updates being committed in the last couple years) and too 
much trouble to maintain fixes for.

My problem was that I was having the same issues trying to rebuild my 
local live-git package, and with the gentoo support gone and being cut 
off from the lists I was having real problems getting a working build! 
=:^(

Fortunately another gentoo user hinted on the tree-cleaning bug that 
there were pull-requests for some of the problems waiting upstream, 
uncommitted due to no active upstream maintainer.  Also, they were only 
partial fixes and he was having trouble too. =:^(

But that provided the clue I needed and got me interested in pan enough 
to bump the priority of working on it here.  What remained was dedicating 
a suitably large block of time to really dig into the problems and see 
about fixing them.

So today was the day.  I spent about 10 hours on it, and both got pan 
building again, and found the new gmane address on wikipedia, gmane.io.  
But pan still seemed runtime-broken, I was able to download new headers 
and the counts updated in the group pane, but the header pane remained 
blank!  Until I figured out by accident that *double*-clicking a group 
loaded the headers now, where previously single-click was sufficient!  I 
suspect it was the update to gtk3.

Also, seems that nntps isn't working at least with the new gmane.io, only 
unencrypted nntp.  Eventually I'll try my block account and see if it 
works there, but meanwhile...

Anyway, I can load and read new posts now!  The question is can I post.  
Apparently some folks have been having problems with posting with pan 
built on gtk3.  Also, does gmane remember my old authorizations for this 
group/list or did they get lost in the move and I'll have to reauthorize?

I guess the way to find out is to send this and see!

P.S.  Looking at some of my old posts I'm realizing much to my dismay 
that I've forgotten some of that pan detail-knowledge! =:^(  Hopefully 
I'm just a bit rusty and it comes back, because I really enjoyed being 
the resource and help I was able to be, back in the day!

-- 
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