[Pan-users] Re: 0.134 and Beyond

[Matej Cepl]

Jeff Berman, Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:45:16 -0700:
> I'm surprised there hasn't been more uptake by others in fixing bugs and
> adding features.  In my mind Pan is the best newsreader out there.  I
> wonder what news reader all the Linux-using C++ developers are using
> (and contributing to)?

slrn? emacs/Gnus? (I guess), or maybe ... see point c) of the following 
text.

I am not sure where should I point my contribution to this thread, so I 
can as well put it just here.

I am not sure how to build communities and revived hibernating projects, 
but I am persuaded I know one very sure way how to smite a final blow to 
a project ... declare your intent to rewrite it in yet another language 
(and don't fool yourself ... pan is not a bittorrent client, there is 
much less GUI-independent parts of it, so rewriting GUI means rewrite of 
almost whole thing). I have nothing against openjdk (/me fights with 
temptation to include jokes about Gentoo, but finally wins), but even if 
I haven't had deepest suspicion against its use for GUI, I would run 
away, because rewriting mentality means that developers have no clue and 
no interest in serving users, so I can as well leave now than suffer the 
pain for some more time.

So, I have just couple of thoughts about things which might help (none of 
them being the miracle-causing one though):

a) open the project as much as possible -- publicly available issue 
tracker (bugzilla.gnome.org seems like the cheapest one at the moment), 
ONE publicly available (even though RO for most people) VCS repository, 
release early release often tarballs (so that distributions can have 
fresh version), IRC/Jabber MUC??? (not sure about this, this ML/NG is 
probably enough),
b) once having an issue tracker (and you can quite merciless with 
awarding WONTFIXes) get rid of the biggest irritants for the users. That 
would include repetitive crashes (I don't know about any, pan seems to be 
quite stable for me, but just in cases there are some known ones) and the 
biggest pet-peeves. I would suggest mine (but I can accept WONTFIX on 
this as well): missing "Cache all unread messages from all subscribed 
NGs" -- my fingers pretty much got hardwired with Ctrl-D,D,C,G 
repetition, but I still feel like an idiot every morning I go through 
this.
c) don't plan Great Changes at all anyway; I think that unfortunately 
whole idea of newsgroups got much less popular lately and people seem to 
prefer such idiotical places for communication as web-fora, facebooks and 
such. I can think that people rejecting NGs are idiots (and I do), but I 
am afraid it won't change the tide.
I have studied administration of newservers lately, and it feels like 
going through cemetery -- a lot of dead projects, books out of print for 
a decade, orphaned projects. gmane.org is the only exception to this 
trend, but I don't see any other recent development for the newsgroups 
revival. I don't see anywhere huge groups of users waiting impatiently on 
better newsgroup reader. Don't expect them much to come.
Maybe that the answer to Jeff's question is that they just don't use 
newsreaders that much any more and they contribute even less.

Best and thanks for the great program!

Matěj