Re: [Pan-users] Re: Folders: gone forever?

[Phil]

One alternative,I know an unlikely one, is a few
faithful users suggest to Charles that we hire a C++
contractor to help him.

To get anything meaningful done would cost $2000+ at
least I imagine.  If 20 people put in $100 each, that
might get a couple of bugs fixed.

Crazy I suppose.

--- Duncan <address@hidden> wrote:

> Charles Sullivan <address@hidden> posted
> address@hidden,
> excerpted below, on  Tue,
> 20 May 2008 12:27:12 -0400:
> 
> > Has Charles abandoned further development of PAN?
> 
> No.  However, he has a big tendency to work on it in
> fits and starts.  
> Before the rewrite appeared, it had been over a year
> (IIRC) since any 
> release, and that had been a couple minor bug fixes,
> over two years since 
> he'd done any major work on it.  Two years is the
> rule of thumb for 
> beginning to consider it abandoned code for many
> distributions, since at 
> that point it's often getting stale and difficult to
> build with current 
> gcc against current libraries and other
> dependencies, and I and other pan 
> loyalists were beginning to deal with what was
> definitely looking like 
> abandoned code, preparing ourselves to at least
> temporarily give up hope 
> for pan and go looking for something else, or to
> seriously start looking 
> for someone else to adopt the code, or something. 
> That wasn't the first 
> time development has pretty much stopped for months
> at a time, but it 
> /was/ the first time at least since I had been using
> pan (starting with 
> 0.11.something, GNOME 1.x version, early 2002 IIRC,
> so it has been 
> awhile) that it was /so/ long.
> 
> Then Charles appears with the rewrite, which he had
> apparently been 
> working on privately for most of that two years, but
> hadn't wanted to say 
> anything as he didn't want to get hopes up.
> 
> After the rewrite went public, things went gung ho
> in an obviously not 
> sustainable by a single dev over the long term rush
> of development -- 
> weekly betas.  Very surprisingly to me at least, he
> continued that hectic 
> pace for somewhat over a year, not /quite hitting a
> weekly release 
> average, but certainly better than a two-week
> average, with a total of 43 
> releases (0.90-0.132).  I'm sure no one with any
> development experience 
> at all expected him to keep that up for that long,
> when he was doing most 
> of the work (others helped and provided some
> patches, but...), and it was 
> after all a volunteer project he was doing and
> continues to do in his 
> "spare" time.
> 
> He took a well earned break after that, long after I
> expected, but I 
> expected it to be a couple months, then he'd come
> back but at a slower 
> pace.  Only it has been... well, 0.132 was released
> on Aug 1, 2007, 
> according to pan's home page, so... nearly 10 months
> now, without hardly 
> a peep.
> 
> I run the SVN version here, and it hasn't had much
> work either.  There's 
> been some translation updates, but that's the GNOME
> translators, not 
> Charles.
> 
> That said, he has apparently still been active in
> the GNOME community.  
> As I said I'm not a GNOME person but for (GTK) pan,
> but apparently, 
> Transition is a GTK/GNOME bittorrent client, that
> had stagnated and that 
> Charles apparently has been quite active on in the
> mean time.
> 
> Back to pan.  It /had/ reached a sort of a good
> pause point.  The new 
> version is quite functional altho there are still a
> couple features still 
> missing as compared to old-pan (including a
> replacement for the old 
> rules, with which one could automate delete of
> ignored articles and 
> download of watched articles, something many of us
> still miss).  Charles 
> had apparently intended to shoot for the magic 1.0
> as the next stable, 
> one of the reasons he started at 0.90 (never
> expecting 40-some betas in 
> ~14 months, maybe 9, before 1.0), but it didn't
> happen that way.
> 
> Meanwhile, there are still a couple obscure but
> non-trivial bugs that 
> really need fixed before a real stable, only they
> are hard to pin down.  
> 
> The big one is one where (apparently) crosspostings
> from a followed 
> group, to one that hasn't been followed, can then
> make it impossible to 
> ever get updates on the previously unfollowed group
> if one decides to 
> subscribe there.  I've run into this here with the
> Gentoo groups (mailing 
> lists as newsgroups) on gmane.  A couple new
> lists/groups were started, 
> but due to cross-posting, pan simply ignores them. 
> I can subscribe to 
> them, but pan never actually downloads anything,
> even if I tell it to get 
> all headers.  The symptoms are very similar to those
> one might see if the 
> server reset its xref numbers, only that isn't the
> case here and fetching 
> all headers would normally get them in that case
> even if they appeared as 
> already read.  Only with this bug, even fetching all
> headers doesn't 
> bring anything in.  If I point pan at a clean
> config, everything comes in 
> as it should, but then I lose track of all the
> messages I've saved and 
> their status.
> 
> But it doesn't happen in /all/ such cases, only
> sometimes.  Others have 
> reported the issue in slightly different
> circumstances, but it doesn't 
> happen to everyone.
> 
> Anyway, with this and a couple other bugs (I don't
> seem to have), it 
> /was/ a rather decent point to pause for a while and
> let usage chase out 
> this and some of the other bugs, before (hopefully)
> a final push to a 
> stable version, 1.0 or not.
> 
> But now development seems paused again.  Given the
> history, there's 
> little doubt Charles will eventually get back to pan
> and it'll go gang 
> busters for a few months again, but I don't believe
> even Charles has a 
> good idea when that might be.
> 
> So I guess that's the answer to your question,
> further development isn't 
> abandoned, just paused, but it's anyone's guess when
> it'll startup again, 
> tho when it does, it'll probably go very well for
> awhile, before pausing 
> once again.
> 
> It'd sure be nice if I had the skills to help with
> development, not just 
> on the lists/groups...
> 
> BTW, I've lost track of whether it was here or
> another group, but talking 
> about pan and alternatives with someone, they hinted
> that klibido now 
> handles text and posting in addition to binary
> downloads, all it did last 
> I checked it out.  I don't know as I've not used it
> for awhile and 
> haven't yet gotten the confirmation that I asked for
> on whether I was 
> reading him right, but I know it /was/ pretty nice,
> if a bit raw being a 
> pretty new app, for binary downloading, back when I
> used it last.  
> Particularly for those with KDE already on their
> system, it may well be 
> worth checking out, as if it's as sweet at text and
> posting as it was on 
> binary downloading, it'll be one sweet client, and
> could well leave pan 
> in the dust.  But it sounds a bit too good to be
> true.  We'll see, I 
> suppose.
> 
> -- 
> 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
> 
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