[Pan-users] Re: posting binaries

[Duncan]

jaucar <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 27 Dec
2008 01:33:35 +0100:

> I cannot send binary enclosed files with Pan. I suppose that it is not
> contemplated. Can one make somehow?
> Is there intention in the future of implementing the option of sending
> enclosed files to the style of Xnews?

It's the intention, yes.  There was, some years ago, even a file picker 
GUI in one of the betas.  Unfortunately Charles decided to pull it as he 
wasn't satisfied with a "trivial" single-part posting mechanism (which it 
would have been at that point), and wanted a nice fancy multi-part 
poster, etc.  Only the code for that somehow has never gotten written...  
IMO it would have been better to go with the trivial single-part 
attachment code and have it all these years, than not have any.  At least 
that would have taken care of some cases, and the below would have 
continued to work for the big-volume poster.

For big-volume posts, the recommendation has always been newspost.  It 
was designed for batch-posting and the like and handles it well, tho it's 
a bit long in the tooth now as it only handles PAR-1 IIRC and doesn't 
handle some of the other "recent" binary advances, at least automatically.

For trivial single-shot single-part binaries, one can either use another 
client (such as knode) which handles attachments, or... you can still use 
pan to do attachments the old fashioned way... manually encode them 
(using uuencode or yencode or uuenview or whatever), then copy and paste 
the resulting encoded text into pan.  Unfortunately it only takes UUE 
format, as the editor won't handle the near-binary of yenc (the widget 
pan uses enforces UTF-8 natively, or some such, then converts it to 
whatever character encoding before send, and yenc isn't legal utf-8) and 
there's no way to access the headers, etc, to create a properly formated 
MIME/base-64 post.

I did, however, create a script-based pan attachment helper, that plugs 
in using pan's "external editor" feature.  The idea is to download the 
script, then setup pan's external editor functionality to point to it.  
You can then hit the external editor button, and the script will take 
over from there.

There's actually a couple versions of the script, pan-attach and pan-
attach-kd.  The former is extremely rough, so much so that I had trouble 
using my own creation, but it was designed as a proof of concept, hoping 
someone else would take the concept and run with it.  It's still 
available because it only requires pan, bash, and uuenview (from the 
uudeview package to do the actual encoding), while the -kd version also 
requires kdialog, part of kdebase (at least the 3.x version, I'm not sure 
about 4.x).  

When nobody ever stepped up to provide a proper front-end, I eventually 
created pan-attach-kd, which is MUCH more friendly if still a bit rigid 
and awkward.  It uses kdialog to create dialog boxes for the file picker 
and etc.  I never got any feedback on the original, probably because it 
was simply too difficult to use.  However, several folks responded 
favorably to pan-attach-kd when I announced it, and apparently still use 
it, as I do, for my occasional trivial attachments.  I should update it 
someday using some of the suggestions I got, and check into whether it 
works with KDE4, which I've yet to upgrade to, as well.

Here's my site.  Nothing to brag about but you'll find both pan-attach 
and pan-attach-kd there, if you want to check them out.  I should update 
it too... =:^)

http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/

-- 
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