[Pan-users] Re: Is this project still alive?

[Duncan]

JCA <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:27:50 -0600:

> Version 0.132 came out some 10 months ago. Is this still being
> developed?

Well, yes, but not really at the moment.

Once you've been around and keeping up with pan for awhile, you'll see a 
pattern.  Charles' development is very fits and starts.  When he's 
developing, he goes great guns and pan progresses very fast, thru 
relatively frequent version releases (better than a release a fortnight, 
43 over a bit over a year, during the last spurt).  Then he'll take a 
break of months, last time it was a couple of years, during which nothing 
much seems to happen, even in the repository.  

I run the live-svn version, and as of last time I updated, a couple weeks 
ago, the biggest changes had been by others, committing l10n updates.  
Even critical/blocker bugs with patches to allow compiling with newer 
glib and gcc, and EVEN a security bug and patch (having to do with nzb 
processing, including pan's own saved task list), haven't been applied 
even to live-svn yet.

glib 2.16:           http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524620

gcc 4.3:             http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524625

nzb buffer overflow: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535413

Now I think everyone should agree that after that marathon of 43 releases 
in just over a year, and after what would have been a quite a bit of 
private work doing the rewrite before that first 0.90 rewrite release, 
Charles certainly deserved a break.  That was after all almost superhuman 
effort for what is after all simply an after-work hobby, fitted in 
amongst family and other obligations.  However, as you point out, it's 
almost a year now...  But as I said, last time, during which time it 
turned out later he was doing the rewrite into C++, it was really close 
to three years (he did put out a couple beta releases at one point in the 
period, tho, but no more).

Really, what Charles needs is a couple other developers to work with him 
on pan, helping to fill in the dead periods, while still allowing him to 
come along every couple years and really go to town on things.  However, 
I've been a regular on the pan lists/groups for years now (since 2002 
IIRC) and it hasn't happened yet.  There was a guy (Chris) that helped 
for awhile, but he was very much either minor, or simply behind the 
scenes.  Charles was still the primary developer.

I'm not sure why this has been the case, whether Charles is hard to work 
with, or whether the area simply doesn't interest most developers enough 
to do more than submit an occasional patch, but that's the way it has 
been.  Of course, as most newsgroup folks already realize, NNTP itself is 
relatively obscure; nothing like web browsers or mail clients, for 
instance, so maybe it /is/ simply lack of interest.  I just wish I had 
the necessary skills to contribute at that level, but I don't, so I 
simply stick around here and contribute what I can, help on the pan lists/
groups.  (The pan lists are available thru gmane.org as newsgroups, the 
way several of us here participate.)

Oh, well.  It is what it is.  Either people with the skills are 
interested enough to take a major and continuing interest, or not, and it 
appears not, so Charles continues his mostly solitary developership, and 
we that lack the coding skills to do more, continue to deal with the on 
and off pattern, because he's providing the code and we're not.

-- 
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