Re: [Pan-users] Feature idea

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 04:55:04PM -0400, Kaijuu wrote:
> 
> I was looking at Brag ( http://brag.sourceforge.net/jindex.html ) which is
> a usenet binary downloader, and thought of this idea: why not implement a
> feature in PAN which generates a accept file (which contains the message
> i.d of the files that is queued) and run a software like Brag as a cron
> job.  This allows the pan to have a ability to download binary during
> off-peak hours.

this is actually a pretty nifty idea. I'd personally like something a bit
more tightly integrated; such that binaries downloaded will appear in Pan's
cache (or at least it'll check for them in Brag's cache, and will have an
option to re-download them itself if something didn't work right), so I can
read posts associated with them easily.

the idea that has kept returning to me, would be to fully split off the
downloader process from the GUI, in something approaching a client-server
relationship. I realize that this is kind of a gray area; because then we're
getting into some of the functionality of a news cache or proxy; and we
probably don't want to go there (that's best left to another program).
having the downloader run as a separate process would:

1. allow remote execution - run the downloader on your co-lo box, and the
GUI on your desktop. or, downloader on your fileserver (lots of space, no X)
with the GUI on your NFS-root diskless workstation (X, slow/no space). I'm
not sure how *really* good that argument is; but I like it. ;)

2. let the GUI crash, while the downloader keeps running. this may become
less of an issue in the future as bugs are fixed, but it is an issue
occasionally.

3. allow cron'ed operation more easily. don't need to be running X while the
downloader is working. I often shut down X at night or when I'll be gone for
a while; to save cycles for distributed.net/address@hidden

in short; while I hate to duplicate existing functionality; I want something
more usable than a simple binary harvester. I'm not a C programmer, so I
don't know how difficult it would be to add some of this functionality to
pan; but I figured I'd throw the idea out and let people discuss it. :)

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com