[Pan-users] Re: Re: Newspost

[Duncan]

Graham posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on Tue,
26 Jul 2005 03:26:58 +0100:

> I understand that you do it only in your spare time, but nevertheless
> you have contributed a very professional program already.  I guess what
> is needed is for a hook on the GUI to access newspost and as I am not
> even in the realms of an incompetent coder, I don't think I'll be
> contributing that.  However, I shall help anybody who wants my
> assistance in any way I can.

Well, note that I'm not a particularly good coder either, rather, a
hobbyist that knows enough about coding to be able to understand the
coder's conversation, so to speak, and at the same time, someone that
happens to enjoy the newsgroup/mailing-list format.  (Note that I
participate on this list thru gmane's list2news gateway, so for me, it's a
newsgroup.)  Thus, the best contribution I can make seems to be that of
the list/group regular that serves as a liaison between the developers
doing the real coding, and ordinary users.  Ideally, and I've gotten
thanks (from both sides) to say it works at least part of the time, this
frees the developers to spend more time doing what we all want them to do,
coding the apps we all love =8^), while at the same time providing users a
reasonable response to their questions and concerns.

Of course, being a volunteer myself, I wouldn't be doing it if there
weren't rewards in it for me, and there are.  Hopefully, the software I
too use gets developed a bit faster due to my presence, and yes, I get to
hang out with devs and sometimes get glimpses of what's coming before it
appears, but really, the biggest reward is knowing that other folks find
my efforts at creating a useful response just that, useful.

To the idea, however.  As I said, I don't really see PAN creating such a
hook on its own.  Rather, when the feature is added, it'll be implemented
in PAN either directly or thru use of a library, as its own code.

That said, it probably wouldn't take a lot to implement an independent
newspost GUI front-end, in TCL/TK or scripted K/G/X-dialog form, if no
other.  I've scripted crude interfaces of that sort before, so I know what
it takes.  Unfortunately, most of my work on that was back on MSWormOS. 
The only scripting I'm half-way decent at on Linux/*ix is BASH scripting,
which is console based.  Equally unfortunately as it pertains to this, I'm
not much of a binary poster myself, so I don't have the personal itch and
thus don't have the need to scratch it, developing that "fairly simple"
scripted interface.

Still, it'd be a very interesting project, for someone.  Maybe even for
me, when/if I get to the point where I'm looking for such a project to try
out my new skills on, once I actually develop them in the Linux realm, all
provided of course events haven't overtaken me and someone else filled the
need, by then.  =8^)

-- 
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