Beartooth via Pan-users posted on Fri, 29 May 2026 19:04:24 -0000 (UTC) as excerpted:
> Hail Duncan! Long time no read. But your post is typical of you: > eminently readable, lucidly organized, and full of useful detail. > (Yes, that's my professional opinion as a literary scholar.) Thank you, > as always, profusely! Thanks. We've had a bit of this discussion before, and I know you're ahead of me on this road, but as I'm turning 60 next year the next decade definitely has some big changes ahead for me, which has me thinking more about what I'm leaving behind. As I've thought about that I've recognized that while I'm single so don't have family to continue my legacy, and I don't have wealth so can't buy a legacy. But one thing I *do* have is all those posts over the years; all those people I've helped and the stack of thanks telling me that it's not all just wishful thinking. I know you were in library work so I'm sure you have a similar stack of people you know you've helped, and can appreciate just how much that means to a person as they consider their legacy, answering for themselves the questions: "What sort of eternal bank balance am I going to leave behind? Am I satisfied with that? What might I (continue to) do to improve it?" > On Tue, 26 May 2026 05:59:02 -0000 (UTC), Duncan wrote: > >> Do note, however, that pan doesn't actually email anything itself -- >> pan only directly sends to news. Instead, pan hands off email >> (regardless of what address is in the Mail To line) to the configured >> email client, so you must have pan configured appropriately for that >> (see pan preferences, applications tab). That works, but if you have >> both pan and your email client configured to add a signature, for >> instance, you can end up with both signatures unless you delete one or >> the other. > > You just gave me a nice piece of news (no pun intended). I didn't > know (though I should've guessed) that pan could append a sig file. > Where do I tell it to? The signature is part of the posting profile. Edit, Edit Posting Profiles, select the appropriate profile and hit Edit (or Add a new one). There's a signature section. Check the appropriate box, and choose the type -- pan actually has several choices there, including running a command and using the result as a sig, using a text file as the sig, or simply typing or copying your sig into a text box. Then, it's a matter of choosing the appropriate posting profile if you have more than one configured. First, each group has a default posting profile which is set in group preferences (select a group, then edit, edit selected group's preferences, or context/right-click on a group and select edit selected group's preferences there). Then for particular posts, the first line in the headers area at the top of a post/reply lets you choose a posting profile (from a drop-down list) if you want to use one different than the default set for that group. >> Or... entirely in pan, just act as if you're followingup/replying and >> then save it to drafts instead of actually sending. That effectively >> stores it locally and should prevent pan clearing it from cache as it >> normally eventually would if it's left in the newsgroup (unless like me >> you have a text-only pan instance with a multi-gig cache that's way >> bigger than the size of the messages you have saved, and have expiry >> turned off). > > Another nugget! How do I configure the cache? The cache settings are in preferences (Edit, Preferences), behavior tab, toward the bottom under Article Cache. IIRC Clear article cache on shutdown is checked by default so unchecking that is the first thing to do if you want it saved across sessions. The size of the cache is also configurable (in the same place). I don't remember what pan's default is, but IIRC it was big enough that if you're doing primarily text groups (including gmane), it normally took several sessions to fill up before it would start deleting the oldest messages from cache. Binary groups are an entirely different story, however, and one of my first frustrations with pan back in the day was that because I was trying to download to cache and then read or save later (a method I brought across from MS Outlook Express, my first news client back in the day...), and I was downloading more than the cache size, it was deleting messages it had just downloaded before I even had a chance to read them! Skimming readers note that while I discuss cache size in some detail here, there's another critical cache-management detail several paragraphs down! Look for the paragraph beginning with **. So I had to set pan's cache size bigger and I did so... as big as it'd let me set it back then, IIRC 1 GiB (1024 MiB). Of course that wasn't /too/ long after 1 GB (note: smaller than 1 GiB) disks were considered "big" and I'm sure some people still had them, so that wasn't an entirely unreasonable max setting back then, but I remember well when Charles bumped the max to 4 GiB, as that was one of the first bugs I had reported against free software after switching to Linux from MS Windows, and I was amazed that "mere users" could actually talk to the actual devs and get things changed... quite a difference from the commercial MS Windows software I had mostly used previously. (Altho I was part of the public betas for IE4/OE4 and in fact, first began reading and replying to posts on the associated IE4/OE4 beta newsgroups on the MS news server. But even running the public betas, as users we didn't interact directly with the MS developers, so being able to do so with Free software developers was quite something!!) Later the max cache size setting was eliminated entirely, so now you can set whatever size you want, 100 gig, 1 TiB? Go for it if you have the space and want to. But do be aware than currently (until DD's sqlite database changes land, something Charles considered near 20 years ago but never landed so it'll be a big deal when it lands), pan loads posts into memory in ordered to properly construct the thread tree when it starts, and particularly if your storage isn't SSD yet, the bigger that cache the longer pan is likely to take to start! I remember pan taking 10 minutes to load here, before I switched off of spinning rust, because my cache was so big and pan was having to load it all off the spinning rust! OK, so size-wise, for my pan text instance I have pan's cache set to 5120 MiB aka 5 GiB here. I actually have it on a dedicated 5 GiB partition too, btrfs, with compression turned on so the files use less space than the actual file size because they're compressed. I have literally /decades/ of cached messages for some groups, going back to 2002 in some cases, and btrfs filesystem usage says I still have over 3 GiB free. Compsize (a tool for btrfs that reports on compressed vs uncompressed size) says: Processed 283321 files, 185121 regular extents (185121 refs), 99678 inline. Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced TOTAL 47% 1.0G 2.1G 2.1G none 100% 14M 14M 14M zstd 47% 1019M 2.0G 2.0G So that's actually a bit over 2 GiB of files compressed to a GiB, 47% of original size as you can see above, not unreasonable for text-data compression when it's set to favor speed over compression size (mount says I'm using btrfs' compress-force=zstd:3 on that partition, which BTW is btrfs raid1 so duplicated to two different physical ssds for data safety, in addition to having backups). du reports similar usage, ~2.1 GiB of file data (uncompressed size of course, for du, since the compression is transparent at the filesystem layer). ** So we've discussed clear-cache on shutdown and cache size, but there's another critical detail left that can still screw up efforts to retain cache indefinitely, if desired, that being expiry! Expiry is a news servers setting, so under Edit, Edit News Servers. IDR for sure what pan's default is, two weeks maybe? Obviously if your intent is to archive the messages, however, you'll want to set it to never expire, which is what I've done, certainly for my pan text instance. For binaries full archiving, actually /never/ expiring, still isn't practical for most users with any level of ongoing binary activity at all (tho with multi-TB drives it's somewhat possible now, for still-image and audio groups at least, arguably less so for full video groups). However, depending on downloading and usage style preferred, setting never expire even for binary groups so you can download messages to cache and go through them after download without fearing they'll disappear on you, then manually delete the cache on the filesystem when you've gone through and saved off what you want and are ready for the next batch, can still be a valid strategy. The alternative (still talking about binaries) is I believe what pan's developers must have originally intended, that being read the headers and selecting to save the desired binaries directly to file (*not* just cache the messages first), in which case cache size doesn't matter so much (really only for recovery of partial downloads in case of a crash), so a smaller cache that expires sooner, say two weeks for the headers, less than a full session for the messages themselves as the binaries from them will already be saved, works fine. With those three pan settings managed, uncheck clear cache on exit, set a sufficiently large size (and ensure you actually have that room on-disk so you won't be filling /it/ up), and set expiry to never, it's possible to have pan archive messages, at least text messages, for decades even, as I'm doing here. Of course if you really /are/ intending to archive them, you'll need to ensure that you have proper backups as well, in case the storage itself dies, taking the messages with it if you don't have backups. -- 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] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
