[Pan-users] Re: How would Pan handle "nonce" subscritption?

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 22 Feb 2009
16:30:12 +0000:

> There are some topics, apps, and lists about them, which I monitor for a
> while every year or two, and then disregard between whiles.

> [Am I] I'm better off leaving my copy of Pan subscribed via Gmane to
> such lists (and several similar ones[?] Or would I do better to unsub
> them and re-sub at long intervals?
> 
> One benefit of the way I'm doing it is that I can still find and
> display my own old threads, clear back to 2004 or earlier. Otoh, the
> cruft rolls in and rolls in, between times when I sift it out.
> 
> Has anybody tried it both ways, long enough to see a definite
> advantage one way?? Especially since it has gotten so much more onerous
> to save stuff inside Pan?

Since there are gmane groups you follow regularly, and if you keep groups 
subscribed, they'll keep grabbing new messages if you tell pan to do so 
for subscribed groups, I'd probably unsubscribe between interest periods.

Note that unlike some news clients, pan does NOT clear headers in groups 
you unsubscribe, just because you've unsubscribed.  (Of course, if you 
have it set to expire messages, it'll do that as they come due.)   Thus, 
as long as you can find the group again, there's no real reason to keep 
it subscribed in the mean time.  In fact, with the "get N days" 
functionality, when you do get interested again, you can quickly get the 
last N days worth of headers and catch up, if you wish (and as netiquette 
dictates), before starting any new threads.

Now what I'd do (and do do, in fact, but for other purposes, binary/text/
test, here) is use the PAN_HOME var functionality to keep different pan 
instances, one for the regularly followed groups, another for the seldom 
updated groups.  That way one doesn't have to worry about finding the 
groups and resubscribing again, but they aren't there taking up visual 
space when they aren't being followed.

However, I know you like to keep things nice and simple and that isn't 
quite so simple, so it's probably not the close enough to perfect 
solution for you that it is for me.

As for saving stuff in pan, as long as you have the expiration disabled, 
pan saves /headers/overviews/ by default.  However, the messages 
themselves do get deleted with the cache, unless of course you've set the 
cache to something huge, multi-gigabyte for text say, and don't do 
binaries so don't use it up that way.  But at least with gmane you can 
always download the messages again anyway, as long as you keep track of 
what headers you want to save, and, probably, delete the others.

But as I've explained before, I find it easier to save messages I really 
want to keep in my mail client, and that's really easy now since all you 
have to do is hit followup and put something in the mailto header (and 
delete the newsgroups header if you aren't actually posting a reply as 
well), then hit "send", and it'll trigger the mail client, allowing you 
to save it as you would any other message, there.

-- 
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