Vito 'ZeD' De Tullio posted on Mon, 21 May 2012 20:02:36 +0000 as
excerpted:
> Hi.
>
> I have a bad connection, and I want to automagically fetch all new
> headers + body of the newsgroup I subscribed.
>
> I found at "Edit" -> "Edit preferences" -> "Actions" a way to cache new
> articles, settings the value "Only new (score == 0)" at the third drop
> down menu (labeled "Cache articles scoring at").
>
>
> Unfortunately, I found that the messages are also marked as read! If I
> do <shift>+a ("get new headers in subscribed news") I can see the layout
> pane with some new messages, but if I select a newsgroup I found no
> unread messages!
>
>
> Is this intentional? Is a bug? Is there a "correct" way to cache all new
> messages in all subscribed groups?
This is quite new code, this year, and hasn't had a lot of testing yet.
"Old-pan", 0.14.x (the old C code, before the C++ rewrite) had what it
called "rules", that allowed various automatic actions including mark-
read, delete, auto-cache, auto-download (plus some others like expiry
that are handled entirely differently in the C++ rewrite) to be
programmed based on scores, age of posts, etc.
Until this year (or perhaps late last year), that was about the only
feature of old-pan that didn't have a corresponding new-pan version as
well. That changed with the introduction of actions.
But in the mean time, pan's long-time primary/lead developer and the
person that undertook the rewrite in the first place, Charles Kerr, moved
on to other things. For many years pan development was all but
abandoned, until KHalay and now Heinrich Mueller, along with Petr Kovar
as release manager, keeper of the pan website and official Gnome
representative, brought back pan from "the dead". Heinrich's the guy who
has taken the strongest interest in actually adding new features,
including this one. (I'm also a long-time pan guy as you can see by the
history here, but I'm not a coder, so most of my activity is here on this
list trying to contribute where my skills let me, and after around a
decade at it with the original coders gone and new ones come, I've been
described as pan's institutional memory, as well.)
Meanwhile, the reason no parallel to "rules" was committed to the rewrite
back when Charles was still in charge was that he thought the way rules
worked was too complex and confusing to configure (with some reason, we
had a lot of questions on it, and I'd guess it was one of the least used
features /because/ rules were so hard to work with, back then), and we
needed a simpler interface to expose that automation.
There was some discussion of the idea back then that ended up with
roughly the interface idea as currently implemented, and both Charles and
I agreed that it was much easier and more intuitive to work with than the
old rules interface.
Unfortunately, by that time Charles was losing interest and about to move
on, and pan code sat basically abandoned for a couple years, the
interface sort of decided but never implemented.
Which brings us almost to the present "new" implementation. People kept
asking for some way to automate such things, and personally, I always
thought that ignored posts should at least be automatically marked read
if not deleted, so when it came up again probably late last year, I again
explained (as I had a number of times before) the GUI idea that had been
discussed those several years ago, but that it had never been
implemented...
Well, being the "lets stop wasting time and just code it" guy he is,
Heinrich took that as an invitation to implement. =:^) He's actually
implemented quite a few new features as well, including the other long
requested feature, binary uploading. After all those long years waiting
and discussing and explaining, I still have a hard time actually
believing these features are actual reality, now, but they're still new
enough not all the bugs have been worked out.
As to this actual feature, while I was the one who (re)described the
interface and functionality as pan now implements it, I've not actually
been active with binaries in years. These days I mostly use pan on gmane,
to follow various mailing lists such as this one, so my use is nearly all
text, and with a reasonably good cable internet connection, I simply
download messages on-demand, to read and reply to as necessary.
So while I (re)proposed the user interface and functionality, I've not
actually tested it. And I've not seen many other regulars mention it
either. So I'm not actually sure that the implementation actually works
as intended.
You're really the first actual usage feedback I've seen on it! That
means you can help us fix it, tho I'm not yet sure whether it's the
functionality that's not quite right, or whether it's not quite as
intuitive as I (and whoever actually came up with the idea originally, it
was long enough ago I'm honestly not sure if it was me or someone else)
had hoped.
With that, the history's out of the way. But my computer isn't quite
stable these days, so let me send this before I crash, then I'll take a
closer look at your actual question, and we'll see if it's your
understanding that's not correct, or a bug in the still new
implementation. More coming!
--
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
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
