Re: [Pan-users] Feature request: compressed header lists

[Arnd]

Duncan <address@hidden> [Wed, 08 Jun 2011
10:22:50 +0000]

[...]
> And it'd be an even BIGGER bonus if someone came up with a patch that
> allowed pan to work with primarily compressed headers and only
> decompress, say, the page it's displaying and the page before and after
> that, thus killing two birds with one stone, if pan then used LESS
> memory than before, as WELL as allowed on-disk compression

Yes, that was the idea, keep those big files in $HOME/.pan2/groups/ in a 
compressed state, as they are large ASCII lists. In fact, the files
$HOME/.pan2/news* could be compressed as well.
Unfortunately I am not able to program patches, but using compressed files 
might be a simple enhancement as long as pan just decompresses the file 
upon accessing it (i.e. when opening a group). I am not talking about the 
files in the cache though, files in a cache should be plain and fast.

BTW, even better than compressing those files would be encrypting them, 
for example through gpg. This would be a big enhancement in privacy.

Keeping the file compressed in memory sounds much more complex from a 
programming point of view.

> (presumably
> controlled with an option, altho it might be a file-only option without
> a UI switch, a number of pan features work that way in ordered to keep
> the complexity of the options dialogs down).

I agree, a UI switch is not needed.