[Pan-users] Re: How to learn the use of pan?

[Duncan]

Julien Michielsen
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 18 Nov 2008
11:37:50 +0100:

> Does any set of instructions for the use of Pan exist?

In general, no, not that I know of.  (Tho someone here had been putting 
something together some time ago, but I haven't seen any mention of it 
lately and don't remember the URL.)

> The manual-indicator on the website still says "under construction".

Yes, it has said that for, I think, the entire century to date, old-pan 
(thru 0.14.x), new-pan (0.90+), same thing.

The problem is I believe that good coders don't tend to like writing 
documentation.  Charles fits that category, so he hasn't written much of 
his own docs.  Over the years there have been others who started, that 
one mentioned above being the last I knew of, but I don't believe anyone 
has ever gotten anything like a full instruction set going.

I expect I've documented much of it in answer to various questions over 
the years, and in fact, the project mentioned above was basically simply 
organizing the various informative posts (mine and those of others) to 
this list/group (newsgroup as presented thru gmane's list2news service, 
which is how several of us regulars participate on the list using pan, 
see http://gmane.org for details) in one place, on the web.  Personally, 
I'm at my most creative answering questions as posted, and wouldn't get 
very far trying to create documentation as such, myself, either.  That is 
why I was interested in that effort to take what was here and shape it 
into some form of documentation standing on its own... only as I said, 
I've heard nothing about it for quite some time, now.  Oh, well...

> The FAQ also did not provide much help.

> Could I find instructions for the use of Pan somewhere?

Well, Charles intends it to be pretty much self-documenting, and to my 
mind, the basic functionality pretty much is.  I really didn't have a lot 
of trouble with basic functionality back when I started using it, 
switching from using MS Outlook Express.  Some of the advanced stuff I 
got hints on from here and simply from figuring it out over the years, 
and I'm glad to pass it on, but the basic functionality... I simply setup 
the config, filling in the server and posting info, and it just worked, 
no instructions needed.

That's really why I'm not suitable to write the docs myself.  I have no 
problem answering questions, but at least for the basic stuff, it's self-
evident to me, so I haven't a clue what needs documented.

So to answer the question, no, unless you ask specific questions.  Then I 
(or others) can give you the answers. =:^)

As to why it may not have saved your settings, had you set PAN_HOME or 
were you using the default data dir (~/.pan2/)?  Someone noted the other 
day that there's a couple things pan still hard-codes, so if you aren't 
using the default location, you have to manually edit the appropriate 
files to get pan to remember its settings correctly.  If you were just 
letting pan use its default location, this shouldn't be the issue, but if 
you weren't, it could be, so let us know, and we can go from there.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman