Re: [Pan-users] 'Old' Pan (pan-0.14.2.91-4mdk.i586.rpm): No longer installs (Mageia)

[Duncan]

Maurice Batey posted on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 16:17:59 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 14 Dec 2012 18:00:26 +0000, Maurice Batey wrote:
> 
>> Having used 'old' Pan for many years (and having tried 'new' Pan a
>> while ago)...
> 
>   When I did try 'new' Pan, here were no migration aids, which meant
> configuring the thing all over again, and without being able to import
> any message database from 'old' Pan.
> 
> Has the situation changed at all since then?

Not really.

The scorefile is basically the same (tho a format variant was supported 
previously that is not now), so chances are you can use the same scorefile 
(possibly with a bit of tweaking if you used the variant).

The cache format is the same, so you can use the same cache.

The subscription tracking is still the same newsrc format, tho you'd have 
to do a bit of renaming.

The preferences config file is still basic xml, so still hand editable if 
necessary, but the options have changed enough that you can't simply use 
the old one, you'll need to reconfigure.

Similarly with the hotkeys, if you've customized them.  But there's a tab 
in prefs that lists the hotkeys now, and you can change them there if 
desired.


The group and message index files have changed rather drastically, to 
more efficiently scale to millions of articles per group.  If you use 
newsgroups in the typical way, expiring old messages, etc, that shouldn't 
be a problem.  I'd have a problem changing /now/ since I'm archiving my 
old ISP's newsgroups, no longer available, in pan, and I'd lose that if I 
had to switch formats, but AFAIK that wasn't possible in the same way 
with old pan, so it shouldn't be a problem for a switch from it.

What /might/ be a problem, however, is the "pseudo-newsgroup" setup old-
pan used for its saved and sent messages folders.  There's nothing like 
that in new-pan.  Instead, messages are saved in-place in the newsgroup, 
since the user controls expiry now and can set no expiry (that's what 
I've done in ordered to archive my old ISP's newsgroups as mentioned 
above, no expiry, and 0 connections, thus disabling further updates, 
since there's no longer a server there to update from), whereas before, 
messages would expire from normal newsgroups when they expired from the 
server.

In theory, however, since the cache format is pretty standard one-article-
per-file, as long as you still have the messages cached, it should be 
possible to import them into a news server or even mail client.  A news 
server could then re-serve them to new-pan, while a mail client would 
presumably build its own indexes.  I guess that's what I'll probably do 
if Heinrich or whoever eventually codes up and releases the long 
discussed but never implemented and released database backend.  Either 
that or I'll simply dump those old ISP newsgroups, probably after 
grabbing a few email addresses I might want for some reason or other at 
some point, since those groups are a few years gone by now, and there's 
not much use in archiving them any longer except that space is cheap 
these days, and I've never gotten around to going thru and grabbing any 
email addresses I might want.


IOW, it shouldn't be /that/ big a deal, if you use newsgroups in the way 
they're normally used, simply letting messages expire eventually, and not 
going back to them beyond the time they'd normally be in cache... which 
isn't all that long with pan's default 10 MB cache, especially if there's 
any binaries.  (It might be a few weeks of text group usage.)  If you do 
something out of the ordinary, it could be a bit worse, but then again, 
in most cases people doing things out of the ordinary understand enough 
about what they're doing, to be able to either recreate, or fall back to 
a workaround, if necessary.

It might take a day or two (with minor tweaking after that) to get new-
pan reconfigured to your liking, but surely, you've put at least that 
much time into just keeping old-pan working, by now.

The one case that I can see that might be a problem, is if you have an 
expensive per-MB inet or nsp connection, with an nsp expiry of say 6 
months or longer (so old-pan wouldn't be expiring them before that, since 
it expired messages at next connect after the server did), and you have 
configured a cache large enough to save that many messages, and refer 
back to them regularly enough that you can't simply redownload the one or 
two you might want to look up.  But even there, since the cache formats 
are identical, you'd have to redownload only the overviews, in ordered to 
reindex.  You'd still have the messages themselves in cache, so the cost 
couldn't be /that/ bad, for headers/overviews only.

Similarly if you're still on a dialup-speed connection.  You'd only be 
redownloading headers since you could reuse the actual cache, which 
should mean minutes, not hours.

-- 
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