[Pan-users] Re: How to upload attachments?

[Duncan]

Kevin Brannen posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on
Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:38:19 -0600:

> Is it possible to make Pan upload attachments?  I don't see any way to do
> that, in both the latest stable version and in the CVS version (as of last
> week).

Sort-of.

PAN has no direct way of uploading attachments.  However, it's possible to
do it one of two indirect ways.

1) Use a stand-alone encoder (such as uuencode) to convert the binary into
an encoded file, then open that encoded file in an editor and select/paste
(non-clipboard X style) or copy/paste (clipboard based) into PAN's text
editor as you would any other content.  Send it as normal.

2) Similarly, use the external text editor function.  It should be
possible, and I've suggested it before but don't know that anyone has
actually done it (if they have, they've not posted it), to script a
solution that does the attachment, then saves the combined message and
attachment, and set that script as your "external editor" in PAN's
preferences dialog, such that when PAN gets control back from the
"external editor", the attachment is now part of the message.  I /do/ know
someone has used a very similar technique to allow gpg-signing of
messages, as that's where I got the idea.  (Unfortunately, I'm not sure
that script was ever posted, tho someone commented they had come up with
one.)

The problem seems to be that the perfect has been the enemy of the good. 
PAN stands for Pimp-ass Newsreader, and that's the goal.  At one point,
there was even a full attachment GUI worked up and released (with the
actual encoding of the attachment not yet enabled, only the file and
encoding type selector) in one of the betas.  Charles
mentioned at one point that he had a working encoder, as
well, to go with the GUI.  Unfortunately, Charles apparently decided the
solution wasn't good /enough/ for the "Pimp-ass Newsreader", because, as
an aside comment revealed sometime later, it only did single part posts,
not handling splitting and the like.

I suppose he thought that once it did that, he'd lose the motivation to
take it further, and that would be the way it would stay, for years, and
he didn't consider that "good enough".  Unfortunately, what with the year
and a half Charles took off (he's a volunteer doing it in his spare time,
one can't blame him for only working on it when he wants to), altho he's
back working on it now, PAN has /still/ been without direct attachment
capacities for "years", since the time of the beta that had the already
working selection GUI, that ended up being removed.

Anyway... the usual response has been to use newspost, the command-line
batch-poster, possibly with its KDE or Gnome front-ends (knewspost,
gnewspost, altho I'm not sure if they are any more maintained).  That's
likely to be better than a PAN solution would have been for anything but
trivial attachment posting, in any case.

One can also use another client.  Since I use KDE as my desktop
environment of choice, I use knode for my very occasional attachment
posting, as well as a keeping a current version merged (Gentoo) as a
backup newsclient, in case PAN goes haywire.  (Not like it has, or is
likely to, at least until CVS gets worked into a new beta to try, but
anyway...)  The trouble with knode is that while it DOES handle
attachments, it does NOT handle yEnc, either encoding or decoding, so it
can neither be used effectively in the binary groups for downloading, nor
for yEnc efficiency level uploading.  Still, it /does/ handle posting
attachments, something PAN can't handle, and since I use KLibido for
downloading (it's far more efficient at multiple servers than PAN), KNode
would really suffice.

AFAIK, the only *ix newsclient that handles both yEnc and posting and
downloading binaries is the EMACS based "Gnus" mode.  How that works with
XEMACS or EMACS under X, I haven't the foggiest, as I decided long ago I
wasn't an EMACS guy.

Unfortunately, there simply isn't anything filling the need for a decent
graphical news client for *ix, that handles both posting and downloading
with attachments in yEnc.

-- 
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