[Pan-users] Re: has development of pan stopped since januari 2004?

[Nicolas Girard]

On Tuesday 09 November 2004 10:18, Duncan wrote:
> As for other newsreaders...  Nothing matches the exact PAN feature set.
> Depending on what you want, KDE's KNode is a decent graphical newsreader,
> but doesn't do yEnc, there's Sylpheed (and Sylpheed Claws, the testing
> version), a graphical reader of sorts, and various other newsreaders CLI
> and GUI based.  Gnus/Emacs is worth a mention as one such solution because
> it does yEnc, altho it's not quite the GUI client PAN is.  If you don't
> mind proprietary-ware and want a good binary news client, try BNR2/BNR3,
> developed using Borland Delphi (for MSWormOS) Kylex (for Linux).  In many
> ways it's presently the best of class, better than PAN, particularly for
> automated multi-server binary harvesting, but it's not open source.
> (Actually, I'm not positive of /its/ status, but I DO know it's developed
> using Delphi/Kylex which is DEFINITELY not open source, so...)
>
> Good luck in your search.  Unfortunately, newsreader choices are a bit
> limited on Linux at present.

Hi guys,
you may be interesting in trying a newsreader I discovered a while ago: 
KLibido (http://klibido.sourceforge.net/)

I intended to post a more detailed review to this mailing-list, but I've run 
out of time, so at least let me say that:

- as an early developped application Klibido is very useable ; sadly enough it 
was not designed to allow posting, but its current feature list is already 
impressive:

    - Automatic joining of multi-part posts
    - Automatic decoding of posts, using uudeview ; yenc also supported
    - Multiple servers support, with priorities and fallback if an article 
      fails on a server and is present on another server
    - Multiple download threads per server support, with the ability to add or 
      remove threads "on the fly"
    - etc. (see the homepage)

- I could quite easily compile and run it on a Mandrakelinux box; here's the 
procedure I followed:

1. Downloaded latest version here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=114928&package_id=124502&release_id=278407

2. Installed uudeview static libraries:

  # urpmi libuu-static-devel

3. Unpacked the archive:

  $ tar xzf klibido-0.12.tar.gz
  $ cd klibido-0.12

4. Modified src/Makefile so that it was aware of berkeley db headers (using 
configure script option "--with-bdb-dir" did nothing)

  $ vi src/Makefile
  append -I/usr/include/db4 to DEFAULT_INCLUDES

5. Builed the stuff:

  $ ./configure --prefix=/urs
  $ make
  $ su -c "make install"

6. Tried it

- Please beware of optimizations when compiling ; Klibido crashed several 
times when using optimizations on my box, and apperaed to be more stable 
withour optimizations.


Oh, and while I'm there: Duncan, I know you had been considering using SQLite 
for Pan's backend before the development branch got frozen ; I've always 
thought it was a very well-advised choice, as SQLite is amazing ; but 
Alessandro, the main Klibido developer, chose to use Berkeley DB... perhaps 
you'll be more successfull than I to try & convince him to consider giving 
SQLite a serious try ?

Cheers,
Nicolas