Re: [Pan-users] Using Pan on Mac

[Duncan]

TvH.Diversen posted on Wed, 04 Dec 2013 09:43:29 +0100 as excerpted:

> I am a Mac user and thinking about switching over to Pan as Newsreader.
> I have 2 pratical questions:

Hi,

Our former resident Mac user and expert (SciFi) hasn't been active on 
this list for some time now, including no reply to someone else inquiring 
about pan on OSX. I don't believe there's anyone else here that knows too 
much about it.[1]

> 1.  Does Pan use "Open Transport"? Reason is that OT is no longer
> supported in OSX 10.9.

I had not the foggiest what "Open Transport" might be until I just googled 
it on wikipedia, but based purely on that[2], I'd say it's quite 
unlikely, unless for some reason gtk relies on that on OSX, and I doubt 
that as well.  Pan does TCP/IP of course, as that's what NNTP uses, and 
anything else that could possibly be related would be via the gtk GUI 
toolkit pan is built upon.  But the wikipedia OT article says it's a pre-
OSX technology and I expect the OSX gtk port would have targeted OSX's 
BSD base and X compatibility layers and wouldn't have been interested in 
the already deprecated old-Apple compatibility stuff at all, so I'd be 
very surprised if gtk uses OT either.

> 2.  Is there a site where I can download a binary of Pan without going
> thru all the motions with Fink?

>From my limited knowledge of OSX, there's three *ix ports projects 
available, fink being one of them that SciFi mentioned as including pan.  
However, there's also a newer one which I forgot the name of, that the 
other pan-on-OSX inquirer mentioned.  I guess pan's also available on 
it.  I don't know which one might be more current or work better.  Which 
you use would be up to you, but I do know SciFi had pan working from Fink 
(tho he built pan itself direct from live-git sources), tho that was 
perhaps a year or 18 months ago last he posted that I recall, but I 
/suspect/ the newer ports project, whatever it was called, might be more 
current and easier to get pan setup and running with, if you're starting 
from scratch.


Meanwhile, however you install it, once pan is up and running you'll 
probably have other questions about it, and there's some not entirely 
obvious "advanced" runtime configuration hints (primarily certain 
settings only available with direct text-based-config-file edits) you 
might find useful as well.  Those sorts of questions tend to be less 
platform specific, and you'll find rather better support here for them as 
a result.

And of course if you're interested in becoming a resident pan-on-OSX 
expert, there are occasional inquiries such as yours that could certainly 
use better answers than they tend to get now, so if you want it, that 
role is yours to fill! =:^)

---
[1] As you may well guess from my sig, I only run freedomware platforms 
here, specifically Linux altho I have have nothing against the 
freedomware BSDs.  OSX might be BSD-based, but it's definitely not 
freedomware!  So while I do try to be helpful, any personal interest is 
purely in that regard; nothing I'd consider touching on my own systems at 
all.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Transport

-- 
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