Re: [Pan-users] [windows] 3 Needed features

[Duncan]

On Thu 14 Aug 2003 07:28, Michael Walsh posted as excerpted below:
> Hi.
> I use pan 0.14.0 on windows because the other builds just don't work
> properly. I still get that annoying problem with the header pane, where
> everything becomes garbeled and I can't see anything. It would be nice if
> that was fixed :)

I no longer do windows, so am not familiar with the problem.  However, 
something that used to work with similar problems was opening a new window 
and moving it over top the garbled one forcing a repaint.  Whether that works 
here or not, I can't say.

> Anyway, 2 things that id like to see.
>
> Working ability to view all old messages. It worked nicely in gravity, just
> select view all messages, and there they were. A quick filter to show all
> messages, and then also a quick filter to show all new messages only?

Was 0.14.0 the one missing the view read messages option?  I thought that was 
one of the 0.14.9x betas?

> Better organisation of stored messages.
> Documents and Settings\username\.pan\messages\cache
> Perhaps an option to have them under messages\cache\server\newsgroup

This won't work.  PAN keeps only one copy of x-posted messages.  In which 
group would it keep that copy?  (In *ix, one could theoretically use probably 
hard links to point to it from the various locations, but MSWormOS doesn't 
have such a feature with many of its file systems, does it?)

An important function of the current system is that once the message is d/led, 
it doesn't have to get d/led again unless it is deleted from the cache, 
saving bandwidth, no matter HOW many groups it was x-posted to.

At some point, PAN's back-end message handling is going to be rewritten to use 
SQLite, a database management library compatible with MySQL (but just a 
library, thus much smaller).  After that is done, a number of fancy features 
will be possible, including virtual servers (combining the same groups on 
several servers into one view) and virtual newsgroups (combining several 
groups into one view) similar to the way BNR2 can handle things.  At that 
point, marking some messages to keep forever, and other such features, should 
be far easier, and won't have to be done twice, as if it were done now, it 
would have to be reimplemented then.  Again, at that point, even if a feature 
isn't directly included in PAN, using MySQL or similar, one could dream up 
all sorts of message database management functionality.

Meanwhile, if you haven't looked into it, check out BNR2 for binary posts.  It 
is available for both Windows and Linux (thanks to the Borland Delphi/Kylix 
platform it is written in), altho I don't believe it is open source, and even 
if so, it is not open source compilable (since it requires Borland's Delphi 
on MSWormOS, Kylix on Linux). As well, BNR2 stands for Binary News Reaper 
Two, and that's what it does -- not text messages, so you will need to keep 
PAN or some other news agent for text.  However, BNR2 does have multi-server 
binary functionality that others can just drool at, at this point.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin