[Pan-users] Re: Re: Trouble reading freenews.iinet.net.au in pan.

[Duncan]

chris posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:10:16 +0930:

> Thanx. Just tried that. This time I tried downloading 5000 article from
> the group aus.politics via freenet.iinet.net.au . I got 189, which is a
> bit better than the mere 4 I got last time. But I should have got 5000
> 
> Again, I got alot of instances of the same error.
> 
> (Null) - article_is_valid: assertion `*a->message_id.str =='<'' failed

Do note that PAN has at times had issues with i18n ( = i-18-letters-n =
internationalization) -- generally various issues with unicode handling
and the like. The times I've seen null-assertions have seemed related to
that, more often than not.  Perhaps that has something to do with it?  I
wouldn't think so being en-au (right?), but...

Anyway, some users have experienced similar issues for some time.  Nobody
really ever expected the current stable and beta versions of PAN to have
remained the latest available for so long, or I expect a bit more work
would have been put into resolving such bugs.  However, work is now
progressing on the next version in CVS, which is enough changed that many
of the old bugs will likely no longer apply.  Of course, it'll have it's
OWN, likely rather large due to the degree of code change, set of bugs,
but that's progress, and they too will eventually be worked out.

A beta of the new code should be out I'd roughly /guess/ sometime between
August and November (tho don't hold me to it, it's a seat-of-my pants
guess, based on the discussions I've seen in dev and here). As mentioned,
expect that one to have a sizable number of bugs remaining to be beat out
of it, altho the biggest ones remain to be squashed b4 then.  After that,
I'd /guess/ a couple additional betas will come out a couple months apart,
and things will stabilize for another stable version some time either very
late this year or 1H2006.  After that, I'm not sure /what/ will happen. 
Development could continue at a regular pace, or the project could go into
suspension again, once the stable release is out.

-- 
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 in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html