[Pan-users] Re: Is this project still alive?

[Duncan]

address@hidden posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on 
Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:00:03 +0200:

> On Monday 13 April 2009 19:55:30 JCA wrote:
>>    The most recent version of this software is some eight months old.
>> Is this project still under development?
> 
> Sure hope so because I use this near perfect news reader daily.
> 
> I think slow development means code is very stable and nearly perfect

Well, it's not there yet.  PAN originally stood for "Pimp-ass 
Newsreader", and by that measure, pan has some way to go yet.  In fact 
the rewrite is still lacking one of the big features that was there 
before the rewrite, rules it was called back then, that allowed someone 
to say auto-delete ignored messages, auto-mark-read low (negative) scored 
messages, and auto-download watched (or all, if desired) messages.  Two 
other oft requested but missing useful features are binary posting, and 
scoring/filtering on the entire post, not just overviews.  Automated 
parfile handling would be nice, too.

Don't get me wrong.  Pan is quite good, in many ways the best available 
on *ix.  But it's far from perfect.  There are newsreaders with each of 
the above features so it's doable, tho I'm not sure if there's one that 
has the above plus everything pan has already.  But were it to have all 
those features plus what it already does, it would indeed be living up to 
its goal and name as a "pimp-ass newsreader"!  Meanwhile, back in 
reality, as I said, there's some way to go still.

As for continued development...  Charles, the pan primary dev, has a way 
of doing pan development in fits and spurts.  He'll go great guns for 
awhile, for example, after the rewrite to C++ came out, there were nearly 
weekly beta releases for over a year.

Other times nothing at all seems to happen for a year or more at a time.  
0.133 came out exactly a year (to the day) after 0.132, and it didn't 
have any major changes, mostly just compile fixes against new versions of 
shared libraries and for new versions of gcc, and an important security 
fix.  Since then, it has been almost nine months, so the total "fits" 
time has been almost two years now.

But, between the last 0.14.x series release and the first 0.90 (rewrite) 
release was more like three years, IIRC, and the last one there had been 
a maintenance release as well, so there had been little public 
development on it for four years or so.  Of course, during part of that 
Charles was certainly coding away in private on the rewrite, but nobody 
knew that.  We had all begun to think it was abandoned and a few people 
had begun experimenting with their own branches.

It'd be nice if pan had a group of devs, stable and steady enough to 
continue at least slow development during Charles' off times.  However, 
that hasn't happened.  (I wish I were a coder.)  Meanwhile, it IS a 
volunteer project he's doing more or less as a hobby -- there's little 
pay tho occasionally something might show up in the tip jar.  As such, 
any time he chooses to spend on it is a gift, not something we can 
demand.  If someone with the coding skills wants to take the code and 
move forward with it, either cooperatively with Charles or on his own, 
it's GPLed so that's possible, but meanwhile, what's there is there, and 
gets worked on when Charles decides he wants to.

-- 
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