Sapient Fridge posted on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 08:46:14 +0100 as excerpted: > 2) Is there any way of automatically downloading all the message bodies > rather than just the headers? My ISP's news service is a bit > intermittent and my old newsreader (Turnpike) would download and cache > everything (including the bodies) it could as soon as available so I > rarely had to wait for anything to arrive. I realise I can select > everything and hit "Cache Article" but is there any way of > *automatically* downloading and caching new message bodies as soon as I > open Pan?
There's no way of automatically downloading all bodies, unfortunately, A feature has been discussed that would work with the scoring categories, configurable to the score category for each, but with the idea that watched articles would be downloaded automatically, ignored would be deleted automatically, and negative-scored would be marked-read automatically. But pan has just for practical purposes returned from the dead, as Charles Kerr, the former maintainer, lost interest, and few enough people do news any more that it just seemed nobody with the requisite developer skills was interested in pan. But khaley came along and started at least gathering all the patches that had been proposed over the years together, plus a bit of extra stuff around the edges, and that git repo was what many of us regulars were running for some time, building from source. khaley wasn't however interested in being an official gnome developer, I'm not sure the reason, so that still left pan without an official way forward within the gtk/gnome infrastructure at least. Until petr kovar, not really a dev but already a gnome translator and pan user, volunteered. So now it's khaley doing most of the development work and pkovar interfacing with gnome, and that's what got us the 0.134 release after years of little activity. But it remains to be seen if khaley (or anyone else for that matter) is interested enough to code up any serious new features such as that, or whether it'll be mostly maintaining pan as is, mainly just keeping it building with current gtk, gcc, etc, plus opportunistic integration of any useful patches that do appear. Of course I and others are hoping for the former and there's certainly features that could be added that would further improve pan, but in the FLOSS world it's the coders that decide where an app goes, and for those of us that aren't coders... As for caching, be aware that for binary use at least, if you're going to be making much use of download to cache, you'll need to increase pan's default 10 MB cache size. The GUI setting for this was removed as too complex and unnecessary for users that direct download anyway, but it remains an option exposed in the text file configuration itself. So editing preferences.xml using a text editor is necessary to change the cache size. It's not difficult to search for "cache" and find it, then carefully edit the setting so as not to screw up the xml formatting, and I can confirm that cache settings of into the double-digit gigs at least, work fine, as that's what I use here. (For binary mode, which I actually don't do very often any more, I always download to cache first, then sort out what's there when it's all local and I don't have to wait for it to download. I have a 12-gig dedicated partition that I use for that, and yes, it works fine, at least on Linux.) > 3) How do I see the raw source text of an article? I sometimes send in > spam complaints but to do that you have to send in the full headers and > I can't work out how to get them from Pan. There's three ways. If you're just wanting a quick look at the headers, use the show-all-headers toggle under view, body pane. Here I have it mapped to the "h" key as the keyboard accel. That used to be the default and I think it still is, but I'm not sure as I long ago customized my accels using the accels.txt facility. But with that set, a quick "h" toggles view headers on and off, as necessary. You can also use the save article function, and choose to save text, not binary (both is also an option). This is at least /almost/ raw, and does indeed save the headers as well. I believe the result here is identical to the file from the third option below, save for the name and location, but I'm not positive of that. Finally, you can grab the message directly as it appears as a file in cache. First, use the view-headers toggle to get the message-id. That in turn is the name pan uses to save the file in the cache, naturally with various filesystem illegal characters fudged away into something filesystem legal. The .msg extension is appended. Once you have the message-id, then, it's possible to pull the message from cache directly, as long as it's still there, of course. (With the 10 MB default cache it won't be for long when pan's actively downloading binaries.) Caution! At least if you decide to increase the cache size as mentioned above, you probably do NOT want to try loading the entire cache in a standard file manager! You could be waiting awhile! Consider that it's very possible you'll have ~100 K of cached files to deal with, EACH of which the file manager will try to scan enough of to assign an icon... Even trying to pick it out with the file open dialog isn't a good idea. Rather, open the file open dialog to the pan data dir if desired, then type in the article_cache directory and message-id.msg, and hit enter without ever attempting to load/show the whole cache dir in the filepicker! -- 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
