Re: [Pan-users] More on 0.13.91

[Duncan]

On Sun 16 Mar 2003 13:21, Bobby D. Bryant posted as excerpted below:
> 2) Pan is no longer reserving a channel for browsing in the foreground
> while downloading queued articles, and I can't find the old dialog that
> let you set up the total number of channels to be used and reserve one
> for browsing.  (Am I merely overlooking it somewhere?  At any rate my
> former preference has not been preserved and it's quite impossible to
> get any reading done while you I a backlog queued up; it sometimes
> downloads several large articles while I'm waiting to read a single
> small one.)

When the switch was made to gnet, Charles set it up to automatically switch a 
connection (or up to all connections, for multi-message-segment tasks) to the 
newest task as needed.  Thus, reserve a connection was thought to not be 
needed any more.

The thing is that in ordered to prevent a currently downloading segment from 
being discarded, all connections finish the current segment they are on b4 
switching to the new task, as needed.  Unfortunately, on slow connections, 
this may mean waiting awhile.  It's possible that if the new task contains a 
single long segment, the first previous connection done will start d/ling it, 
but b4 it finishes, additional connections will finish what they were doing.  
Making matters appear worse, if the b/g task had short segments, several of 
those may get done b4 the single f/g task finishes.

Charles has mentioned on other threads that he'll probably put the "reserve" 
feature back, as he decided taking it out was probably a mistake, when he 
tried PAN on a slow dialup connection.  He asked what others thought, tho, 
also.  Everybody responding seems to want it back, so I'm guessing it will be 
back, probably with the next beta.

I can't easily answer the others, so I'll leave them be..

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