Re: [Pan-users] Oh, for draft folder!

[Heinrich Mueller]

On 06/26/11 06:20, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Duncan wrote:
>
> This is what I consider to be acceptable behaviour:
>
> (1) Auto-save is independent from manual drafts, and the locations 
> should be different. Auto-save files can have arbitrary file names, 
> manual save drafts must be given human readable names. Drafts 
> functionality, as it currently exists, should remain.
>
> (2) When Pan starts up, it should inspect the Auto-save location for 
> any files. If it finds any, it should automatically restore them into 
> a Post Article dialog box. There is no need to ask the user whether or 
> not to do so, just do it.
>
> (3) While any Post Article dialog is opened, Pan should auto-save the 
> contents of each dialog (including any custom headers) every few 
> minutes, with no interaction with the user (unless the disk is full, 
> in which case it is acceptable to notify the user that auto-save has 
> been *temporarily* disabled and continue working without it). For 
> performance and battery life on laptops, if the contents haven't 
> changed since the last auto-save, don't do anything.
>
> (4) If the user closes the Post Article dialog without sending, the 
> auto-save file should be silently deleted.
>
> (5) If the user sends the post, Pan should save the post in a Sent 
> Posts location, then delete the auto-save file. Pan may choose to move 
> the auto-save file to Sent Posts instead.)
>
> (6) Sent posts should not be treated as downloaded news posts. It is a 
> record of what you sent, that is all. Whether or not the user then 
> downloads a copy of their post from the news server has no bearing on 
> whether or not they have a copy of what they sent.
>
> (7) It would be nice, but not essential, for the user to view these 
> posts in Pan itself.
>
> (8) The naming scheme used in Sent Posts should be human readable. For 
> example, Pan might choose to dump all sent posts in one directory, 
> with the date/time stamp as name, and a counter for uniqueness:
>
> Sent Posts/
> +-- 2011-05-13-15:23:09-0001
> +-- 2011-06-25-23:58:34-0001
> +-- 2011-06-26-00:02:05-0001
> +-- 2011-06-26-00:17:41-0001
> +-- 2011-06-26-00:17:41-0002
>
> An alternative might be to use sub-folders, based on the date:
>
> Sent Posts/
> +-- 2011-05/
>     +-- 13-15:23:09-0001
> +-- 2011-06/
>     +-- 25-23:58:34-0001
>     +-- 26-00:02:05-0001
>     +-- 26-00:17:41-0001
>     +-- 26-00:17:41-0002
>
> Or to indicate the newsgroup sent to (but how to handle cross-posts?):
>
> Sent Posts/
> +-- alt.books.pratchett/
>     +-- 2011-06-26-00:02:05-0001
>     +-- 2011-06-26-00:17:41-0001
> +-- comp.lang.python/
>     +-- 2011-05-13-15:23:09-0001
>     +-- 2011-06-25-23:58:34-0001
>     +-- 2011-06-26-00:17:41-0001
>
> or some other scheme. (My personal preference would be date-based, but 
> that's just me.)
I agree with all of that. I'm thinking about implementing that...
> [...]
> > So now pan doesn't know the message-id for a message it posts, and 
> > thus has no way to verify whether it posted successfully or not.
>
> Does anyone think that Pan needs to verify if messages post 
> successfully? It doesn't do so now, and it never did. I suppose it 
> would be nice to get the equivalent of a bounce "your email could not 
> be delivered" message, but as I understand it, that's not how Usenet 
> works.
>
> [...]
With my additions pan does save the success/failure messages of posts in 
the log but doesn't do any retries besides for the obvious network errors.
I think we would get crazy if pan shoved thousands of failure messages 
into our faces. But if you browse through the log, you can find the 
missing parts/posts. Pan does know the message-ids if you append the 
header in the extras tab which also now works for binary posts. Besides 
that, the server returns a fail/success message for every post. Pan even 
does a verify for normal posts.
> > But it did have the local copy if the server didn't take it, and if 
> > the user somehow became aware of that fact, the local copy could be 
> > reposted.
>
> Or even just for archival purposes. Or for reference purposes, e.g. I 
> often want to refer back to some post I made five years ago, when I 
> posted some nice code snippet, or used a particularly good turn of 
> phrase, or linked to a url... whatever. I should be able to grep my 
> Sent Posts folder to find it, without having to keep local copies of 
> usegroups going back five years, or without having to remember to 
> manually save each and every post before sending.

Yep, totally agree. Nice idea.