One alternative,I know an unlikely one, is a few
faithful users suggest to Charles that we hire a C++
contractor to help him.
To get anything meaningful done would cost $2000+ at
least I imagine. If 20 people put in $100 each, that
might get a couple of bugs fixed.
Crazy I suppose.
--- Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Charles Sullivan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted
> [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> excerpted below, on Tue,
> 20 May 2008 12:27:12 -0400:
>
> > Has Charles abandoned further development of PAN?
>
> No. However, he has a big tendency to work on it in
> fits and starts.
> Before the rewrite appeared, it had been over a year
> (IIRC) since any
> release, and that had been a couple minor bug fixes,
> over two years since
> he'd done any major work on it. Two years is the
> rule of thumb for
> beginning to consider it abandoned code for many
> distributions, since at
> that point it's often getting stale and difficult to
> build with current
> gcc against current libraries and other
> dependencies, and I and other pan
> loyalists were beginning to deal with what was
> definitely looking like
> abandoned code, preparing ourselves to at least
> temporarily give up hope
> for pan and go looking for something else, or to
> seriously start looking
> for someone else to adopt the code, or something.
> That wasn't the first
> time development has pretty much stopped for months
> at a time, but it
> /was/ the first time at least since I had been using
> pan (starting with
> 0.11.something, GNOME 1.x version, early 2002 IIRC,
> so it has been
> awhile) that it was /so/ long.
>
> Then Charles appears with the rewrite, which he had
> apparently been
> working on privately for most of that two years, but
> hadn't wanted to say
> anything as he didn't want to get hopes up.
>
> After the rewrite went public, things went gung ho
> in an obviously not
> sustainable by a single dev over the long term rush
> of development --
> weekly betas. Very surprisingly to me at least, he
> continued that hectic
> pace for somewhat over a year, not /quite hitting a
> weekly release
> average, but certainly better than a two-week
> average, with a total of 43
> releases (0.90-0.132). I'm sure no one with any
> development experience
> at all expected him to keep that up for that long,
> when he was doing most
> of the work (others helped and provided some
> patches, but...), and it was
> after all a volunteer project he was doing and
> continues to do in his
> "spare" time.
>
> He took a well earned break after that, long after I
> expected, but I
> expected it to be a couple months, then he'd come
> back but at a slower
> pace. Only it has been... well, 0.132 was released
> on Aug 1, 2007,
> according to pan's home page, so... nearly 10 months
> now, without hardly
> a peep.
>
> I run the SVN version here, and it hasn't had much
> work either. There's
> been some translation updates, but that's the GNOME
> translators, not
> Charles.
>
> That said, he has apparently still been active in
> the GNOME community.
> As I said I'm not a GNOME person but for (GTK) pan,
> but apparently,
> Transition is a GTK/GNOME bittorrent client, that
> had stagnated and that
> Charles apparently has been quite active on in the
> mean time.
>
> Back to pan. It /had/ reached a sort of a good
> pause point. The new
> version is quite functional altho there are still a
> couple features still
> missing as compared to old-pan (including a
> replacement for the old
> rules, with which one could automate delete of
> ignored articles and
> download of watched articles, something many of us
> still miss). Charles
> had apparently intended to shoot for the magic 1.0
> as the next stable,
> one of the reasons he started at 0.90 (never
> expecting 40-some betas in
> ~14 months, maybe 9, before 1.0), but it didn't
> happen that way.
>
> Meanwhile, there are still a couple obscure but
> non-trivial bugs that
> really need fixed before a real stable, only they
> are hard to pin down.
>
> The big one is one where (apparently) crosspostings
> from a followed
> group, to one that hasn't been followed, can then
> make it impossible to
> ever get updates on the previously unfollowed group
> if one decides to
> subscribe there. I've run into this here with the
> Gentoo groups (mailing
> lists as newsgroups) on gmane. A couple new
> lists/groups were started,
> but due to cross-posting, pan simply ignores them.
> I can subscribe to
> them, but pan never actually downloads anything,
> even if I tell it to get
> all headers. The symptoms are very similar to those
> one might see if the
> server reset its xref numbers, only that isn't the
> case here and fetching
> all headers would normally get them in that case
> even if they appeared as
> already read. Only with this bug, even fetching all
> headers doesn't
> bring anything in. If I point pan at a clean
> config, everything comes in
> as it should, but then I lose track of all the
> messages I've saved and
> their status.
>
> But it doesn't happen in /all/ such cases, only
> sometimes. Others have
> reported the issue in slightly different
> circumstances, but it doesn't
> happen to everyone.
>
> Anyway, with this and a couple other bugs (I don't
> seem to have), it
> /was/ a rather decent point to pause for a while and
> let usage chase out
> this and some of the other bugs, before (hopefully)
> a final push to a
> stable version, 1.0 or not.
>
> But now development seems paused again. Given the
> history, there's
> little doubt Charles will eventually get back to pan
> and it'll go gang
> busters for a few months again, but I don't believe
> even Charles has a
> good idea when that might be.
>
> So I guess that's the answer to your question,
> further development isn't
> abandoned, just paused, but it's anyone's guess when
> it'll startup again,
> tho when it does, it'll probably go very well for
> awhile, before pausing
> once again.
>
> It'd sure be nice if I had the skills to help with
> development, not just
> on the lists/groups...
>
> BTW, I've lost track of whether it was here or
> another group, but talking
> about pan and alternatives with someone, they hinted
> that klibido now
> handles text and posting in addition to binary
> downloads, all it did last
> I checked it out. I don't know as I've not used it
> for awhile and
> haven't yet gotten the confirmation that I asked for
> on whether I was
> reading him right, but I know it /was/ pretty nice,
> if a bit raw being a
> pretty new app, for binary downloading, back when I
> used it last.
> Particularly for those with KDE already on their
> system, it may well be
> worth checking out, as if it's as sweet at text and
> posting as it was on
> binary downloading, it'll be one sweet client, and
> could well leave pan
> in the dust. But it sounds a bit too good to be
> true. We'll see, I
> suppose.
>
> --
> 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
>
=== message truncated ===
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