Re: [Pan-users] New file posting feature, broken? Misunderstood?

[Duncan]

Heinrich Mueller posted on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:21:41 +0200 as excerpted:

> Normally attachments are yEnc-encoded with uuencode, then sent. The
> message text is discarded for now, as it would be the same message for
> possibly 100s of files anyway.

OK, that answers another problem/question I had, what was happening to 
the text post I expected to appear along side the binary files.

(Yes, the binaries did post once I changed the cachedir perms 
approriately.  But the text post that was supposed to accompany them 
didn't appear and I wondered why.  Now I know.)

Could the text appear as another post, beside the others?  That's what I 
expected.

Meanwhile, the binary posts all seem to strip the references header.  If 
the original post triggering them (the one the user selects files to post 
on) is a reply, the references header shouldn't IMO be stripped but 
instead should remain, so the posts ultimately end up threaded under the 
post the user was replying to when he selected the files to post.

Finally, could the encoding type be made user-selectable?  For posts to 
for example gmane, the mailing list to news and back gateway, most 
readers will be seeing the message in their /mail/ clients, many of which 
don't implement yenc.  That's the problem I just had (the guy with the 
question got the files but couldn't read them).  Being able to select 
encoding type would eliminate that issue.

Ideally, one selectable encoding type would be "identity", which would 
post plain text files directly, identity-encoded aka unencoded.  
Obviously this would break with binaries, but for text files the zero-
encoding-overhead and maximum receiver compatibility looks enticing 
indeed.  Basically, the post would be a text post containing the content 
of the text file as its body.  As it happens, that would have been 
exactly what I needed for the case above where the recipient couldn't 
decode the yenc encoded files, as the files involved were xorg config 
files from xorg.conf.d.

(Yeah, I expected they'd end up yenc and wondered if he could read them, 
but couldn't pass up the chance to play with my new pan file-posting 
feature toy!  As it turns out its good I did, as at minimum, I had that 
umask and consequent cachedir directory issue to work thru.  But in any 
case I do far more tech-lists postings these days than binaries, and I 
think it has actually been over two years since I even touched the binary 
groups, so text/identity-encoding would actually be far more useful to me 
than yenc, even if I /can/ basically do the same thing with copy/paste 
from a text editor.)

-- 
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