Re: [Pan-users] Re: Old Pan v0.14.2.91 keeps adding removed newsgroups into my .newsrc.

[Phillip Pi]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:52:53AM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> > Oh wow. Pan has ~/.newsrc support now? I remember v0.106 didn't have it
> > from my old post in 2006:
> > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pan-users/2006-08/msg00042.html ...
> 
> As Charles says in a reply there, it uses newsrc format natively now.  
> However, it doesn't use the specific name ~/.newsrc by default in part 
> because pan is now (with the rewrite, so from 0.90) fully multi-server 
> integrated, and newsrc is single-server only.

Can it still use one .newsrc (share with Tin) and one news server? I
only have Giganews and that's enough for me. The reason why I like Tin 
is because I use it via SSH, mark busy binary newsgroups quickly and 
exit so I don't have to download old headers later. For example, I visit 
my busy binary newsgroups at 5 PM, mark all newsgroups to update their
header values, save, and exit. After 9 PM, I go to Pan and download the 
newsgroup headers, find my stuff I want and download. At least I save 
and don't waste bandwidth on stuff I don't care. Yes, I know when things 
get released.

 
> However, in addition to the symlink Charles mentioned then, once you have 
> pan setup, it's possible to edit its (text based) config files directly.  
> In this case, it's servers.xml (~/.pan2/servers.xml by default, but it's 
> possible to tell pan to use a different config and data dir by setting/
> exporting the PAN_HOME environmental variable for pan to read when it 
> opens).
> 
> Here, I renamed the various newsrc-1, newsrc-2 files to for instance 
> newsrc.gmane, for the gmane one, and newsrc.cox for my ISP's (Cox's) news 
> server, with the path set as desired.
> 
> Assuming you are running only a single news server or only one that you 
> want to place in ~/.newsrc, anyway, it'd be simple enough to make that 
> change directly in the servers.xml file (with pan closed, of course) once 
> you have that done the initial pan server setup.
> 
> > Has Pan fixed issues like highlighing newsgroups and download new
> > headers as shown in my old 2006 posts:
> > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pan-users/2006-08/msg00048.html ?
> 
> Pan does multi-group select now, yes.  Both ctrl-select and shift-select 
> work as normal, with both the mouse and the keyboard.

Yay!!!

 
> Pan is much more stable now too.  I believe you'll find 0.133 much more 
> so than 0.10x was, for sure.  Looking at that old thread, the one thing 
> that pops out to me now about it is that possibly pan got mixed up with 
> that symlink in place before it was fully initialized.  But I doubt 
> you'll find the problem still there and if you do see it, I think we can 
> get it fixed this time.

I noticed lack of updates lately. Is this going to be a problem of 
getting updates/fixes if I run into any?

 
> There are two features of old-pan that don't yet exist in new-pan.  One 
> "isn't a bug it's a feature."  The other Charles wasn't satisfied with 
> the old implementation of and he hasn't gotten around to creating a new 
> one yet, tho we have a good idea what it'll most likely look like when he 
> does.
> 
> The first "not bug, feature" is the way the groups are listed now.  This 
> affects people with huge numbers of subscribed groups mosts.  You got a 
> glimpse of it with 0.106 but it wasn't working right for you for some 
> reason back then.  Hopefully it does, now.  Previously, since pan treated 
> each server more or less separately, separate group list, etc, it was 
> possible to break the subscribed group list in parts, by setting up 
> multiple "servers", each set to the same real "server" but with different 
> subscribed groups.  Since pan now handles all servers in a unified nearly 
> transparent way, there's only one group list for all servers and it's no 
> longer possible to break up the subscribed groups into different lists by 
> setting up different "servers".
> 
> The workaround for that, which I use here, is to setup multiple entirely 
> separate pan "instances", using the previously mentioned PAN_HOME 
> variable.  Here, I have text, test (which gets all my just go to a group 
> and look around stuff), and bin.  I've setup little pan starter scripts 
> for each one that does a bit of pre-start setup including setting 
> PAN_HOME as appropriate, to ~/pan/xxx, where xxx is either text, test or 
> bin.  Not only does this allow me to keep separate group lists, but all 
> settings are separate (save for the few files I symlink to a common 
> version, this includes my scorefile and accels.txt).  Thus, I can have 
> separate cache sizes and locations, separate expiry settings, etc.  The 
> last bit of config to go with this is that I have separate kmenu entries 
> for each instance as well, instead of the normal single entry.  Of course 
> I have hotkeys setup for all my commonly used menu entries including pan, 
> so I can start it with the touch of a couple buttons.

Interesting, but you say this for multiple servers which I don't have 
and will not have.

 
> Due to the number of requests, at some point pan will likely get either 
> an unlimited nesting subscribed groups tree, or at least one more level 
> of nesting, so people can break it down into groups of subscribed groups 
> at least.  However, that's not likely to be near term unless someone 
> helpfully provides a patch. =:^)
> 
> The second missing feature, this one not yet implemented, is something 
> parallel to old-pan's rules.  There were only a few ways the rules could 
> be used back then.

Are those filter rules? I rarely use them.

 
> One of them was for expiry.  New-pan handles that somewhat different and 
> much better now, so there's not as much need for rules based expiry.  
> (The setting for headers is now local, per server but entirely 
> independent of whether the server still has the messages available or 
> not.  Of course, full message expiry is based on cache size, which 
> defaults to only 10 MB with no setting in the GUI to change it as it was 
> considered too confusing.  But as with a number of other settings, it can 
> be set by directly editing the config, here, preferences.xml.  I have a 
> several gig cache for both my text and binary instances, which as they 
> are separate and I have header expiry entirely turned off for text, means 
> I now have a couple years of text messages stored -- and growing. =:^)

Ah, I usually set my cache to 1 GB and empty out old ones. Also, every
time I finish Pan, I do a catch up/mark all (shift+ctrl+m -- I hope this
is way faster in newer Pan for those huge binary newsgroups!) and empty
caches (shift+ctrl+del)) and exit manually.

 
> The other was for automated download/mark-read/delete, as appropriate.  I 
> used to use rules for automated download of watched messages, auto-mark-
> read of negative-scored messages (keep them around but marked read, so I 
> don't see them by default but I can toggle view unread-only off and load 
> a negative-scored parent-post if necessary), and auto-delete of ignored 
> messages (these I didn't want to see at all, not even to refer to if 
> mentioned in replies).
> 
> That functionality is still entirely missing, which is a problem.  A lot 
> of folks have requested some way to auto-download, for instance, while 
> others are irritated when "ignored" messages still count toward unread 
> count.
> 
> The proposed simplified version would simply be another tab, "Automated 
> Actions", in preferences.  It would list the same score categories as the 
> color preferences and header-pane view-filters, ignored (-9999 and 
> below), low/negative (-9998 to -1), zero, medium (+1 to +4999), high 
> (+5000 to +9998), and watched (+9999 and above).  Each category could 
> then be set to automatically download/mark-read/delete as desired by the 
> user.  This is MUCH simpler than the rules based actions of old-pan, but 
> because scoring is reasonably flexible and it's based on scores, should 
> be pretty close to as powerful.  Users who wanted to auto-download 
> everything could set auto-download all the way to zero-score or lower, 
> while auto-delete and auto-mark-read if desired for negative scored 
> messages could also be setup, with all three auto-* actions entirely 
> optional.
> 
> But meanwhile, I really DO miss both auto-download and auto-delete, in 
> particular, and there's a lot of others that do and have requested in 
> particular auto-download, as well.

Interesting. I don't think I will use this. The way I use Pan is: Load a 
newsgroup, highlight, press shift+s to download and decode into my HDD, 
repeat with other groups and threads, mark all in newsgroups and 
empty newsgroup caches (mentioned my key combinations earlier) that are 
done, wait for downloads to complete and are OK, mark all and empty 
caches for the last newsgroups, and exit Pan. That is what I pretty much 
do!

 
> So if that's critical to the way you use pan, you may need to continue to 
> stay with old-pan, despite its problems including severe lack of 
> scalability.

OK, I will check it out when I have more free time (not now!). I will do 
a backup of my ~/.pan/ before I try it.

 
> Oh, one more thing.  If you should find pan stalling and you run GNOME... 
> well, here's a quote with the culprit and the fix (see the "Pan brings PC 
> to a standstill" thread in the archives for more, if desired, Walt and 
> David Shochat were the ones who finally spotted the culprit app, the 
> below quote is Alan Meyer confirming):
> 
> On Ubuntu 8.10, I clicked System / Preferences / Assistive Technologies,
> and unchecked "Enable Assistive Technologies". Not long after that I
> rebooted for other reasons.  I don't know if the reboot was required or
> not, but the next time after that that I started Pan, the standstill
> problem seemed to be cured.

Thanks. I use KDE v3.5.10 in pure Debian. The same OS that I tried newer 
Pan back in 2006. ;)

Also, I am looking forward to using nzb in Pan too. I hope that works 
well now. I use nzbget via SSH though (no need for GUI).
-- 
"Every ruler sleeps on an anthill." --Afghani
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