[Pan-users] Re: VDQ : can I double Pan?

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 07
Aug 2006 11:53:17 -0400:

> Very Dumb Question : by 'double' I mean something I'm not sure of a better
> word for -- two, occasionally simultaneous, instances (both for the same
> user) with different sets of subscriptions to the same servers.

That's not currently possible, at least not without "extraordinary"
measures, such as compiling pan once, then changing the source to point to
a different config dir and create a differently named binary, and
recompiling.

With "old" pan, one could play various tricks with a single pan instance,
like setting up multiple news servers actually pointed at the same "real"
news server, using those for catagorization.  Since new-pan keeps
everything in a single displayed list, that's no longer possible.

It's not going to make it for pan 1.0 which is slated for later this
month, but a frequent request has been at least a two-level tree, allowing
some categorization, with groups appearing under whatever category.  As it
has been requested by a fairly broad range of people, and the single group
list is undeniably harder to manage as the number of groups and general
topics, and text vs single-part-binary (jpeg) vs few-part-binary (mp3) vs
many-part-binary (iso) groups one subscribes to increases, this will
almost certainly be added at some point, but I believe it'll require some
reworking of current code, likely introducing a whole new series of bugs
into the mix in the process.  For that reason, I'm a bit doubtful it will
make it into 1.1 either, as there's still enough other stuff for 1.1
without that. However, by 1.2, it could easily be the biggest single
problem, so I'd guess it won't be far beyond that. I'd further guess that
1.1 will be out by the end of the year, and 1.2 first half of next year,
if things continue at a reasonable clip.

Meanwhile, you have a at least three alternatives.  One is to continue
running old-pan for at least some of your groups, either with new-pan for
others, or old-pan exclusively (this will work best for those not needing
the multiserver integration or better scaling of new-pan, both of which
are normally going to be of most interest to binary group users), using
multiple servers in old-pan as your categorizing mechanism.

A second choice is as I mentioned, compiling pan, then modifying it a bit,
to use a different config/data dir and compile to a different binary.  For
those who never compile anything, only using pre-built binaries from their
distribution or whatever, this would be a huge step.  However, for those
already compiling pan from tarball, even those who don't actually do any
coding, a global search and replace of the sources for pan2, replacing it
with say pan3, to change the config dir, should be fairly simple.  All you
need to know besides the usual compile from source stuff is how to use
the search and replace of a good text editor.

A third choice would be to actually create another user, cloning your gtk
settings and a few other minimal user config details, and simply use sudo
or similar to start the second-user's version (realizing of course that
there will be some additional complications, setting up X so the second
user can use X resources of the first user... I don't know many of the
details there, but know it can be done).

-- 
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