Re: [Pan-users] Trying to use 'new' Pan

[Duncan]

Maurice Batey posted on Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:46:55 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:22:03 +0100, I wrote:
> 
>>  I've installed the Mageia-3 Pan 0.139.
> 
>   So new pan uses a ~/.pan2 directory*.
>   
> Does it use any other control files (config etc.)?
> 
> So if I need to clone new pan to e.g. laptop for use away from base, I
> just need to take a copy of (or update via rsync) the current ~/.pan2?

In general, yes.  (Tho IIRC the scorefile may still check the general 
~/.News/ dir or some such as well, to better interoperate with slrn, 
which uses the same general scorefile format.  I know pan used to take 
either the pan2 or News location, whichever it found, but am not sure if 
it still does.)

It's also worth noting that you can set the PAN_HOME var in the 
environment pan inherits, pointing it at some other location, and pan 
will use that instead of ~/.pan2.  Here, I actually use that trick to run 
several separately configured pan instances, using a wrapper script that 
(among other things) sets PAN_HOME appropriately.  My instances are text, 
test, bin(ary), but of course you could setup mp3, tv-show, text, for 
example, or setup a scheme with a "hidden" wrapper not in your path that 
thus had to be run from the commandline, to hide your pr0n groups in, if 
desired.

> (* Nevertheless it seems one cannot have old and new pan installed
> together, as installation of new pan uninstalled old pan!

> Can that be avoided e.g. by first renaming /usr/bin/pan?)

The replacement-without-ability-to-keep-both would be a characteristic of 
your chosen distro/package-manager/pan-package, not of pan itself.  

But yes, as a matter of fact I renamed the old-pan binary and kept it 
around for many years, myself, to better answer questions about it.  I 
only deleted the old (still runnable) binary a year or so ago, concluding 
that after all /this/ time, anybody still running old-pan must surely be 
very familiar with it having run it all this time and likely having 
deliberately saved it from replacement by new-pan, and would be unlikely 
to have further questions that I'd actually be able to answer, as they'd 
surely be more familiar with it after running it all the time all these 
years, than I would be after having not fired it up at all for years 
(except out of curiosity to check whether it still ran, shortly before 
deleting it), since nobody had asked an old-pan question in years.  That 
works fine, and should continue to do so until such point as the old 
binary no longer runs at all.

-- 
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