Arnd posted on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:22:27 +0000 as excerpted:
Compressing the files in $HOME/.pan2/groups/ would save a lot of space
for big groups, and therefore make it easier to take .pan2/ with you
onto space limited devices like netbooks, and or syncing it between
computers.
Ideally this would be a per group setting, with a choosable compress
format (gzip, bzip2, etc.).
Or is there a trick to do this right now?
In theory it could be done now, if you're using a filesystem like reiser4
or btrfs, both of which are supposed to have builtin/plugin on-the-fly
compression available.
A rather more practical alternative would be using a pan wrapper script
that among other things, decompresses these files before pan starts, then
waits around until it closes and recompresses them. I use a wrapper
script here for other reasons, but not for file compression.
FWIW, ordinary messages, both text and non-yenc binaries, should compress
extremely well too, since text and both UUE and base64 encoded binaries
are not particularly efficient, particularly UUE/base64 encoded binaries.
However, pan's cache is only 10 MB normally anyway, reasonable as a text
cache, but it'll blow away REAL fast as a binary cache, so unless you have
manually increased the cache to multiple gigs as I do...