Re: [Pan-users] Yet Another Feature Request.

[Jeff Vian]

I see a problem with this.

If I want to download some articles that are near their expiration and 
are near to being expired from the server...  With the idea of switching 
to the most recently queued article as the next one to download this may 
not be ideal.

Hypothetical Example:
1.  I read news weekly
2.  The server expires articles weekly in the group I am in
3.  I see some articles that came in just after I last D/L the articles. 
These are near expiration, so I queue them for download
4.  I see some newer articles I also want and I queue them. (These are 
now set to download first)
5.  Some of the articles in (3) are expired before the download finishes.

This has been discussed in the past and I know there was some discussion 
of how to make sure older articles were downloaded first.  That was one 
advantage to the reserved connection in that it did not disturb the 
order in which articles were scheduled to download and it made sure that 
a connection was available for reading at the same time as articles were 
being downloaded.

While I like the use of multiple connections for a single multipart 
article I believe some attention should be paid to the sequence in which 
articles are queued and allow users to select which get prioroity.

It also needs to do similar to now in that articles being read need to 
take precedence over those being downloaded.

Maybe a flag to turn the reserved connection on/off and to allow the 
user to change the priorities (sequence of downloading) would be nice. 
If the connection is reserved, do not put new articles first, and if not 
reserved do put them first.

Duncan wrote:

> On Wed 12 Mar 2003 10:44, Eric Ortega posted as excerpted below:
>  
>
> > I many times queue up a pile of binaries to download and then decide that
> > I want to also get one or two things that I've just seen.  Currently I
> > add them to the queue, open up the task manager, move them to the top,
> > and be happy.
> >
> > I've done this enough times now over the years that I wonder if it might
> > just be possible to add a "save binary (top of queue)" option that would
> > just shortcut all that tedium?  I'm thinking Shift-pipe-S or shift-1-S
> > would be nice key combos for it (or ctrl-shift-S or ...).  :)
> >    
>
> This would be handled automatically in current, w/ the gnet library.  PAN now 
> dynamically reassigns tasks (after each one completes its current segment) to 
> the newest one on the list.  Thus, you'd set up your original d/ls, find 
> more, set them to run, and PAN would finish the immediately downloading 
> segments in each connection and reassign them to the new task (up to the 
> number of connections allowed or the number of segments in the new task).
>
> The scoring in the newest beta is OK, but the dynamically reassigned tasks 
> were a REAL usability improvement, here.  Until scoring can work on 
> non-x-over headers, or attachment posting or server collating are added, I 
> expect that dynamic reallocation of tasks will remain the biggest development 
> I've seen since I've been with PAN.  (Switching to gtk2 and getting 
> customized hotkeys back were also pretty big, but the switch isn't the same 
> as adding a major new feature, and getting hotkey customization back was a 
> regression fix, not a new feature.  Getting an open function back would be 
> nice as well, but that'd be a regressing fix too..)
>
>