"Glen Stark" <m...@glenstark.net> posted 000f01c9d494$83ed38e0$8bc7aa...@net, excerpted below, on Thu, 14 May 2009 15:04:27 +0200:
> Hi Everyone. > > Well, I've been silently observing the mailing list for a while now. > I'm happy to see that it's still pretty active. Just to let everyone > know where I'm coming from, I'm actually a pretty good programmer, > particularly in C++. I'm a bit of a GTK neophyte, but I have written a > couple of small applications using the toolkit, so I can usually muddle > my way around. Cool. =:^) > I recently checked out the cvs version of pan, because I wanted to be > able to download multiple articles using only the keyboard. > Unfortunately this is proving to be a little trickier than I would have > thought, and I just don't have the time right now to work on it. But I > hope soon. CVS was just a figure of speech, right? You mean Subversion or GIT, right? (FWIW Gnome just announced a switch to GIT not long ago, and PAN's repository is with Gnome, but I don't know the status of pan's switch, directly. But before that it was subversion.) On the keyboard-only bit, I'm honestly not sure. I certainly must have my keyboard shortcuts, but I'm personally mixed-mode and switch between keyboard and mouse easily and often enough that I honestly can't say how pan does on keyboard shortcuts. You have discovered that all the menu actions have customizable hotkey assignments, right? No coding necessary for that, just editing the accels.txt file, in pan's standard data dir, ~/.pan2 by default, and mine is certainly heavily customized so I know it works. (It can sort of be done from the GUI, under certain circumstances and with some limitations, but editing the accels.txt file works better for me. Keep in mind that pan re-dumps it at every close, scrambling the order, so if you sort it, sort it to another file, and copy it over the accels.txt any time you make changes.) But... I'm still not sure how easy all keyboard navigation is. Hotkeys are one thing, but general navigation is something else entirely, and I normally use the mouse for that so don't know how good pan is or isn't. > On the other hand, I had a few ideas that I thought we on the list might > get active on, kind of as a present for Charles, if and when he graces > us with his presence again. The first was documentation. Good idea. I know during the long break that ended when Charles revealed the C++ rewrite, several folks got involved somewhat, and Charles was able to use their ideas to VASTLY improve memory handling and scaling in the rewrite. > I read the recent discussion regarding the decision to simplify the UI, > and how we have to muck around in the preferences file. I actually find > this a good philosophy, although I would debate on a point by point > basis on certain GUI elements that have been excluded. Anyway, this got > me to thinking that the problem with not having a GUI to set, for > example, the default cache size, is it's not immediately transparent to > figure out how to do such a thing. That further got me to thinking > that, jesus, that web page saying the pan project is going to have > documentation soon hasn't changed in YEARS! Yeah. People keep starting on it, then they run out of steam and it doesn't go much of anywhere. Charles has said that the object in the GUI is to make it so it needs no documentation, and Pan does reasonably well with that I think, at least for those who've worked with other news clients, but that doesn't take care of the stuff that's not in the GUI. > Now I recently set up a couple of wikis at work, and y'know, it's easy > and quick. I'm totally willing to set up a pan wiki for people to write > documentation, if anyone out there wants to contribute to it. So if 2 > or more people say "heck yeah, I'd write a page or two", I'll set you up > a wiki, and provide the hosting. I'll even donate a few hours here or > there writing a little docu myself, but I'm not going to do the whole > thing myself. I'll put it right out in front that if Charles wants to > take it over and incorporate it over at rebelbase, it's his. Actually, someone had put together a wiki. I'm honestly not sure how much he got on it. FWIW, I'm told I'm reasonably good at explaining things (while OTOH being told I'm too wordy and repeat things, but luckily that works for some people, as it seems to be the way I am), but that's on the list/newsgroup (newsgroup, aka list, but thru gmane's list2news gateway). In pretty much any other medium, including wikis/blogs/web- forums, I don't do so well and get writer's block. So while I certainly don't mind people taking my list/news posts for their wikis, that's what it ends up being and I don't contribute much directly, only thru the group/list. So anyway, I'm not sure I even visited the previous wiki, and I'm not sure how well it did or even if it's still up. If that guy is still around on the list, perhaps you two can collaborate. I wonder if I can still find the link and check it... > As for code contributions, I have a lot on my plate at the moment, but I > might be able to squeeze a little time into working on PAN in July. I > could probably make my patches available. If any of you non coders have > quick and easy things that are driving you nuts, maybe I could hook you > up, as a way of getting my feet wet in the PAN pool. I'm not sure how "quick and easy" these are, but here's the common list. My pet wish: Extend the scoring so it works on all headers and the body, once they are available. Working on overview headers only is nice for pre-download actions, but it's very limiting, and if a second scoring run could be done once the post was local, it would enable, for example, killfiling those trolls that change from headers constantly, to avoid killfiles, but have a unique non-overview header, say nntp-posting-host, or post content heavily infused with ALL CAPS or swearing, for instance. This has been on my wishlist for /years/ since before scoring when it was still three- way-filtering (kill/normal/watch). Charles "blueskied" it. Nice to have, but not likely right away, unless someone supplies the patch... and I don't code. Unfortunately, this probably isn't "quick and easy". Frequent request: This one may be easier... maybe. Make the group list tree nestable, with the ability to sort groups into user labeled categories. This was sort of doable with old-pan, by setting up different logical servers (which could point to the same server address), since each server was handled separately. New-pan integrates the groups from all servers into the same list, so that no longer works. Personally, I use the PAN_HOME env variable feature to setup multiple pan instances and sort my groups that way, but that's rather more complex and inconvenient than a nestable tree setup would be. Frequent request: Setup scoring actions, with a new preferences tab that allows one to automatically delete, mark-read, cache, or download and save, based on scoring categories (the same scoring categories pan already uses). The preferences tab layout has been discussed, ask if you're thinking about doing it. The meat of the patch, however, would be the engine to automate the actions based on the score. This one's a fairly high priority for Charles too, as it's the last real feature that old-pan had that new-pan doesn't. Given that pan can already auto-fetch headers/overviews, this would allow users that wished to, to pretty much entirely automate pan, making it cron-job-schedulable or the like so they could set it up to fetch messages a couple hours before they come home from work, say, and have them all downloaded and waiting. (The mechanism would be to simply set auto-download for normal- scored or better, but we need the feature available, first.) Partially implemented patches: There are already patches for a couple other neat features, including the ability to set preferred spell-check language per-group. for instance. As-is the patch doesn't really match Charles' simplicity standards as one must type in the appropriate language abbreviations (it'd be better if they were drop-down selectable), but for those multi-linguals who participate in groups of different languages, its a seriously useful feature, none-the-less. If you could figure out how to detect what's available and make the dropdown, this would almost certainly be taken on as a distribution level patch, even if Charles didn't implement it. It'd be simply too useful to ignore. I'm only English here so can't really test it, but I'm applying it and have the textbox for spelling language in my group preferences dialog. Ask if interested and I'll dig up the patch and hopefully the bug and/or the list poster for it. That one might be the easiest, and it WOULD be useful to a lot of people, tho not me so much. Again, ask if interested and I'll post what I can get (at least the current patch, as I apply it) on it. -- 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 Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
