Re: [Pan-users] Update on cron-friendly Pan

[John J. LeMay Jr.]

** Reply to message from Frank Van Damme
<address@hidden> on Mon, 4 Nov 2002 20:39:03 +0100


> > * Having the status messages from the bottom of the main window
> >   (showing percentages of a task completed, for example), a la wget,
> >   is also do'able, but more work and maybe not desirable in cron.
> 
> Uh? Where would the output go?

I have a feeling it would be emailed to root unless you disabled mailing
results for the job or mailed it someplace else (both set in the crontab file)
 
> > * A middle-ground approach that I like, which gives user feedback
> >   but also plays well in a cron environment, would be to have Pan
> >   write all the log messages (ie, everything the GUI puts in the
> >   log window) into a log file ($PAN_HOME/log.txt?).
> 
> I thought of that reading point 2 :-)
> 
> Maybe some kind of html output is nice? doesn't hae to be more then <table> 
> to 
> separate date and action.

When run from cron as a non-root user, $PAN_HOME is probably a good place for
the log so long as the max log file size is configurable. I'm not a big fan of
nicely formatted output - ie html - since it would make parsing the log file
more difficult should the need or desire arise.

Is there any thought being given to using Pan to serve news to a series of
local users now that it will be "cronable"? Ie, run from cron as root and write
an article cache that can be used by multiple users? In this case using a
syslog server or at least writing logs to /var/log someplace would be
appropriate. This opens the question of how would a series of users use this
cache though. cp the cache at login or Pan-in-gui-mode startup to $PAN_HOME?
Not sure if it's possible, just thinking out loud so to speak (or write).

-- 
John LeMay
Senior Enterprise Consultant
NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-785-2525
Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions