JCA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:27:50 -0600:
> Version 0.132 came out some 10 months ago. Is this still being > developed? Well, yes, but not really at the moment. Once you've been around and keeping up with pan for awhile, you'll see a pattern. Charles' development is very fits and starts. When he's developing, he goes great guns and pan progresses very fast, thru relatively frequent version releases (better than a release a fortnight, 43 over a bit over a year, during the last spurt). Then he'll take a break of months, last time it was a couple of years, during which nothing much seems to happen, even in the repository. I run the live-svn version, and as of last time I updated, a couple weeks ago, the biggest changes had been by others, committing l10n updates. Even critical/blocker bugs with patches to allow compiling with newer glib and gcc, and EVEN a security bug and patch (having to do with nzb processing, including pan's own saved task list), haven't been applied even to live-svn yet. glib 2.16: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524620 gcc 4.3: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524625 nzb buffer overflow: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535413 Now I think everyone should agree that after that marathon of 43 releases in just over a year, and after what would have been a quite a bit of private work doing the rewrite before that first 0.90 rewrite release, Charles certainly deserved a break. That was after all almost superhuman effort for what is after all simply an after-work hobby, fitted in amongst family and other obligations. However, as you point out, it's almost a year now... But as I said, last time, during which time it turned out later he was doing the rewrite into C++, it was really close to three years (he did put out a couple beta releases at one point in the period, tho, but no more). Really, what Charles needs is a couple other developers to work with him on pan, helping to fill in the dead periods, while still allowing him to come along every couple years and really go to town on things. However, I've been a regular on the pan lists/groups for years now (since 2002 IIRC) and it hasn't happened yet. There was a guy (Chris) that helped for awhile, but he was very much either minor, or simply behind the scenes. Charles was still the primary developer. I'm not sure why this has been the case, whether Charles is hard to work with, or whether the area simply doesn't interest most developers enough to do more than submit an occasional patch, but that's the way it has been. Of course, as most newsgroup folks already realize, NNTP itself is relatively obscure; nothing like web browsers or mail clients, for instance, so maybe it /is/ simply lack of interest. I just wish I had the necessary skills to contribute at that level, but I don't, so I simply stick around here and contribute what I can, help on the pan lists/ groups. (The pan lists are available thru gmane.org as newsgroups, the way several of us here participate.) Oh, well. It is what it is. Either people with the skills are interested enough to take a major and continuing interest, or not, and it appears not, so Charles continues his mostly solitary developership, and we that lack the coding skills to do more, continue to deal with the on and off pattern, because he's providing the code and we're not. -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
