[Pan-users] Re: can't save mac binaries

[Duncan]

Jay Graves posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below, 
on Fri, 12 Sep 2003 14:43:32 -0600:

> I have used pan for a few years now and I couldn't live without it.
> Thanks.

Same here!  =:^)

> Recently I got an apple powerbook and I am running pan on it using fink.
> For some reason when I try to download .sit binary mac files from
> newsgroups such as alt.binaries.mac.* they do not get saved.  The
> download process starts and finishes, but when I go to open the file, it
> is not there.
> 
> Not only does this happen on my powerbook but my regular amd athlon
> machine running Debian unstable shows the same behavior.
> 
> Does anyone know why this is?

You say you've been using PAN for years, but you don't mention whether you
normally use it for binaries of any size, or just single part binaries and
text, other than for the Mac groups.  If U regularly do multi-part
binaries and the problem doesn't occur on anything but SIT files, this
probably isn't the issue, but it could be if the SIT files are larger than
what you normally do with PAN..

Is your cache set big enough to get the entire file?  When I first started
using PAN, I kept getting frustrated trying to d/l stuff, because the
cache was to small, and by the time I got around to attempting to save one
file I'd d/led (but not yet saved), another would have squeezed it out of
the cache.

There are two solutions to this.  One is to size your PAN cache larger.  I
have mine set to 4 gigs now (and it was my suggestion that prompted
Charles to increase the max size from 1 gig to 20 gigs, back with 0.12 or
whatever it was), running on it's own dedicated 8 gig partition so I can
always size it larger if necessary, tho I seldom use more than ~ 2 gigs.

The second, if you don't want to run gigabyte plus caches, is to always
use save attachment to DOWNLOAD the files, rather than d/ling them first,
than saving them from cache, as I prefer to do.   Of course, the cache
must still be big enough to hold at least the single file currently being
d/led and saved.

If it's not that, it's likely some strange decoding bug in PAN, or
simply that the files not being posted in an encoding PAN understands
(yEnc, MIME, etc) in the first place.  They aren't encoded in the Mac
common but otherwise uncommon bin-hex, are they?  I don't believe PAN can
automatically decode that.  (If they are, perhaps a patch would be
welcomed, tho I'm not sure on a non-standard encoding like that.)

If they are strangely encoded, then PAN won't do the decoding 4 U, but U
should still be able to use PAN to d/l them.  Just save the article not
the attachment, then use other utilities presumably available on the Mac
to do the decoding.  Of course, if U R going to be doing a lot of d/ling
of this type of file, it may just be simpler to use a different news
client that understands it, at least for those groups.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin