David Chmelik posted on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 02:21:02 +0000 as excerpted: > On the PAN site, I tried donating (‘tip jar’ to Charles) to support > development, but some days/weeks later, Paypal said it was cancelled...
[I've been off the lists for a few days...] Hmm... Charles was the long-time pan primary dev, but he hasn't been active on pan for some years now, so perhaps he decided pan-related tips to him weren't appropriate any longer... Actually, current development status is... interesting. As I said, Charles has long ago left pan development to others. Petr Kovar is in charge of pan at both gnome and the pan.rebelbase.com website, but he's actually more comfortable as a translator and doesn't claim to be a code dev, so while he takes patches and push requests from others and does testing and release management, he depends on others for any big coding jobs. Some time after Charles left, Heinrich Muller did some heavy coding and added several until then still missing features including binary posting and the optional automated actions based on scores, but he hasn't been around for awhile either. Since then, it has mostly been the odd patch to keep pan building and running against the latest libraries, along with some tweaks necessary to kill some gtk3 bugs as gtk2 slides deeper into maintenance-only mode and toward eventual obsolescence. Those sorts of patches tend to be submitted by code-literate users or distro maintainers running into the bugs themselves or getting user reports about them, and while they do keep pan working, they're more maintenance than real continued development. But... (a) even when Charles was lead dev, development tended to be in fits and starts, with quiet periods of a year or two between mad development and introduction of new features, so /that's/ nothing new, and (b) with Heinrich's completion of the binary posting and automated action features, arguably, pan is /reasonably/ mature and feature- complete anyway, so maybe it's mature and maintenance-mode is to be expected at this point, especially with fewer people doing news these days compared to a decade or two ago. In general, NNTP seems to be going the way of the gopher protocol, and it's just not interesting for most devs these days. Sad, really, but OTOH, NNTP's obscurity has always been both a blessing and a curse, limiting the attention of the masses and with it the attention of the censors and copyright patrol, but even in its heyday also limiting the attention of possible developers and the degree to which ISPs were willing to provide NNTP servers, etc. Oh, well... [As for me, I'm not a dev either, tho I know enough about it to speak the lingo to some extent and to often be able to read and/or modify patches and mostly follow a git log, which comes in handy for the packages, including pan, that I build from live-git on my gentoo machines. And I've been on this list for over a decade and a half now, including a period when I was more or less keeping the lights on as Charles had left and no one had yet volunteered to step up as Petr and Heinrich did. So I'm sort of the historian on the list, and can often explain to new people on the list, users or devs, how and why pan works the way it does, because in many cases I was there when the feature was first discussed or introduced. But not being a dev I really can't do much with the code, other than test live-git pan and sometimes apply and test or run patches mostly created by others.] -- 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
