[Pan-users] Re: Binary Postings Through Newspost

[Duncan]

Graham <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon,
02 Oct 2006 00:00:57 +0100:

> I know this issue has come up before, but as we're getting towards the
> final version of Pan, can some consideration be given to those who wish
> to post to binary newsgroups?
> 
> Currently, I have to do this independently of Pan, as Pan contains no
> facilities to encode the binary postings.
> 
> It has been suggested before that anybody wishing to post binaries
> should use newspost, but I should like to see a facility within Pan
> (either through a hook or plugin) to utilise newspost.
> 
> Can this be done, so that posting and receiving should be done within
> the same gui?  There are no guis under development either for Gnome or
> KDE, and what is available do not work with either the new versions of
> those desktops or with the latest version of newspost, and in case they
> are separate from the newsreader.
> 
> Are there any plans to incorporate the facilities of newspost in Pan?

No immediate plans (pre-1.0), no, and I'm guessing it would take the form
of pan doing it itself rather than being a front-end when the feature is
eventually added.

FWIW, I had a very (as in extremely) crude script designed to be plugged in
as pan's external editor that would do it, and had posted it in the past
so you can check the archives.  It uses uuenview from the uudeview
package to do the dirty work. I've improved the script a bit since but ran
into an unrelated issue testing it (my provider's test group now doesn't
take binaries and I didn't know that so thought it was a problem with the
script, and haven't got a chance to go back and try again now that I got
confirmation that the group I was testing in wasn't taking binaries so it
wasn't my script).  I normally have a bit of time later in the week
(Thursday-ish) to work on stuff, and am hoping to get back to it this
week.  If/when I do, I'll probably post it on my webspace this time, as a
bit more permanent than simply posting it to the group/list every so
often, and post a link here.

As I said, the script is crude.  Basically, you place a couple lines in
the post body specifying the file name and encoding style, like this:

%%ENCODE=yenc%%
%%ATFILE=/path/to/file%%

Then hit the external editor button (which should be set to pan-attach
%t), and if it works the way it's supposed to, it'll encode the file and
attach it after the sig.  Nothing GUI, and as originally posted, if one
forgot the exact format of the special lines, one had to open up the
script in an editor to figure it out.  I had created it and posted it, tho
extremely crude, as a proof of concept, hoping someone else would pick it
up and do something better with it.  Unfortunately, that didn't seem to
happen.  Thus, my latest changes add a -h/--help test and spit out the
instructions if it's called with that, so at least one can run it from the
command line and get the format one needs to use, instead of having to
load the script in an editor to check every time as I was before.

Eventually, I want to set it up to use
kdialog/xdialog/whatever-replaced-gdialog, giving it a proper GUI.  That's
what I was hoping someone else would do.  However, since it hasn't
happened, I decided to add at least the help output, for now.  Then I ran
into the testing issues, and also seemed to have another issue with yEnc
but didn't trace it due to the server related problems.  Anyway, hopefully
with a bit of testing on a proper binary test group, I can get it working
again later this week and post the URL to a slightly improved version.

-- 
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