Re: [Pan-users] Pan 13.90 feature hide-n-seek

[Duncan]

On Tue 11 Mar 2003 19:23, Johan Ovlinger posted as excerpted below:
> Hi!
>
> A recent upgrade from RH 7.3 to the 8.1 beta (due to hardware upgrade)
> has left my old and trusty 11.4 about as stable as a delusional
> psychotic in a magic-mirror room.

Wow!  Scary concept!!

> So I'm forced to run 0.13.90.

U aren't forced to run anything.  In fact, if you value stability over the 
latest (and possibly stability robbing-est <g>) features, in the 0.13.9x beta 
series for 0.14.0, scoring, stable version 0.13.4 would be preferred over the 
beta 0.13.90

>  In addition to the already mentioned
>
> 1)  save-attachment-named-as-article-subject. An improvement over
>     0.11.4 would be to allow the filename to be constructed using
>     %s,%a,%d stringsubs. But just plain save as subject would be
>     %great.

This has been a requested feature, currently missing, unfortunately.

The general reason some of these features were taken out is two-fold.

One: PAN 0.11.x used Gnome 1, but >=0.12.x used only GTK (2) and a few 
libraries, so functionality formerly using the full Gnome were either 
dropped, or recoded individually.

One-A:  In addition to making a PAN deployment more flexible on *ix, cutting 
the Gnome dependencies made porting to MSWormOS far less complex.  That's 
been done, altho the MSWormOS port isn't considered stable, yet.

Two:  Charles is quite keen on keeping bloat to a minimum, it would seem.  
Features just for the sake of having them, where they aren't commonly used, 
tend to disappear, over time.  It can be frustrating if you were one of the 
few that used a feature, but it DOES keep PAN lean and mean, and far more 
stable and easier to continue maintanance and development than it would be 
otherwise.

I'm guessing that specific feature will return at some point.  It just isn't 
there now.  Unfortunately, I don't have any idea when that point might be.  
Of course, if you are a coder, a patch might help speed the process 
significantly.  (hint, hint  <g>)

> 2) Reserve a connection for interactive tasks. I'm really suprised
>    that this fell by the watside, and thus strongly suspect that I'm
>    just not finding it.

This isn't needed any more, in most cases.  PAN's task scheduler is far more 
dynamic than it was back in 0.11, as the introduction of the gnet library 
really made things far more flexible.

The way things work by default now, all connections can and normally are 
thrown behind a single task, if said task is a multi-part or batch download.  
The scheduler dynamically throws as many connections as necessary (up to the 
per server limit) behind the latest task, leaving the previous task for 
later.  It didn't do this before, so a reserve feature was handy to have.

The one caveat, especially on slow connections, is that the currently active 
message segment is completed, by each connection, before your latest task 
begins execution.  However, since there are up to four such connections to 
work with, and as they complete the segment they are on, they switch to the 
new task (or one does, if it's just a single message segment that needs d/led 
for the new task), this shouldn't be a big problem, except if you are 
attempting to d/l huge message segments over a slow dialup connection, which 
isn't to practical for such huge segment binary post tasks in the first 
place.

> 3) File->Open Attachment (keyboard shortcut O in 0.11.4).  An
>    improvement over 0.11.4 would be to have this count as an
>    interactive task.

AFAICT, that functionality relied on Gnome.  This has come up repeatedly, and 
is one thing I'd like to get back as well.  The suggestions to date have been 
to use some sort of image viewer setting, similar to the browser and text 
editor settings already there.  A variation on that would simply use the 
browser to open everything, relying on its handling of mime-types, presumably 
with a default MIME type of image/jpeg etc. for non-MIME encoded posts.  Even 
this would be better than nothing, as from there, one could presumably ask 
the browser to open the file in whatever one wanted.

As it stands, the best available work-around is to save-as to your desktop, or 
whatever, and open it from there.

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin