[Pan-users] Re: New version of pan ?

[Duncan]

Valeryan_24 posted on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:34:19 +0100 as excerpted:

> Hello,
> 
> First I'd like to thank all developers for Pan program, which allows us
> to get a very good newsreader on Linux since years.

=:^)

> I read this summer on the mailing list that there could be a new
> released version of Pan which would have all the patches and
> improvements made by participants since pan 0.133 beta.
> 
> On this list, rather active, we read a lot of messages about these new
> functions, from pan creator and new contribers.
> 
> So I just wondered if this new version was still planned and should be
> soon released ?
> 
> This is absolutely not a critical post, just a question from an user
> unable to compile development versions.

Being brutally honest, I'm not sure what the direct short answer to your 
question is, but things aren't looking good. =:^(

Unfortunately, pan's status as a traditional package with periodic 
official upstream releases is seriously in question right now, and I can't 
honestly tell you there'll ever be another (or that there won't, for that 
matter).  It makes me sick to say it, but (again) being brutally honest, 
what we're watching now is how many open source projects ultimately die.  
If something doesn't change, it's more a question of when to give up and 
call the mortician, than if, altho thankfully we've not reached that point 
yet as there's still both an active user list (this one) and active 
community development (centered around KHaley's git repo, as you probably 
know given your references).  But Charles Kerr has publicly stated that he 
really doesn't have the interest any more in being pan's head developer 
and official maintainer as he no longer regularly uses newsgroups at all, 
and without someone else to take over, the official version gets more and 
more stale (even tho distributions continue to apply patches so it'll 
compile and run on newer systems for a time, typically years, and 
translators likewise continue their updates for some time, as can be seen 
in the official upstream gnome repo), until at some point distributions 
cease to consider it worth the trouble and drop it as a package.  When 
that happens, an app's discoverability goes down and it essentially ceases 
to bring in new users, so all that's left are the few old timers, which 
ultimately migrate to new systems and generally find themselves dropping 
the package as too hard to continue to update on their own, save perhaps 
for a core following, who continue to update and compile from the live 
sources repository, until it too dies, at which point they may continue to 
patch it on their own for awhile, until...

So what we really need is a good developer with enough interest in pan and 
enough familiarity with gtk/gnome to volunteer as project maintainer.  
Charles has repeatedly hinted at such and recently has come right out and 
asked for it.  Unfortunately, while pan does seem to still have a 
reasonable number of users, I'm not the first to observe that there's 
something about development in the FLOSS community that encourages 
interest in new technology, and the old nntp protocol and text-based 
newsgroups are apparently simply not new and interesting enough to get a 
lot of FLOSS developer interest, these days.  As such, nobody with the 
requisite skills seems particularly interested in pan, leaving us where we 
find ourselves...

There are two arguably reasonably technical people remaining active in the 
pan user community, as measured by this (and the pan-devel) list.  I'm 
one.  KHaley's the other.

But I don't do either C or C++ code, and recently I bit the bullet and 
admitted I probably never will, or if I do eventually learn it, I'm not 
likely to ever be particularly /good/ at it.  Besides, I'm a kde not a 
gnome person, who'd be using a kde news client if a decent one existed at 
the time I chose pan as a project I wanted to involve myself with, helping 
on the lists/groups (I do this list, as all the lists I participate in, as 
a gmane.org newsgroup), and who really doesn't like or agree with gnome 
policies in general, so even in the event I became a good enough 
programmer to do it, I'd forever be fighting the gtk-ness of pan, and 
might well choose to work on a kde news app instead.

And KHaley... well, I'm not speaking for him (her?), and I must admit I 
don't fully understand why he doesn't volunteer for it as he's basically 
doing most of it already with the community repo he runs, but he's made it 
plain he's not particularly interested in filling that official role, for 
whatever reason, and that's his right as it's certainly a volunteer job, 
thus not forceable (not that we'd want to force it, but if I had an extra 
few thousand dollars laying around, I'd consider asking if someone would 
be interested in doing it for a sponsorship, and he'd of course be first 
on the list).  Whatever the reason, tho, that option seems off the table.

Which leaves pan with nobody both interested and with the skills to be the 
official project maintainer, presently, on its slow way toward death as a 
viable FLOSS project, if no "white knight" programmer with a pan interest 
comes along to save it in the time remaining before it loses viability to 
the point that distributions drop it, or immediately thereafter.  Of 
course, as with any FLOSS project, it could be resurrected after that as 
long as sources are still available /somewhere/, but realistically, the 
distribution drop event is the last real chance at catalyzing a result, 
bringing it back from as near death as projects tend to get, and still 
come back.  And given the activity level for the official package, 
realistically, that event's probably closer than those of us here might 
like.

Oh, well...  Personally, it's been years since I did binaries (not 
opposed, I simply find other things a higher priority) and my ISP bowed to 
economic demand reality and dropped news as a bundled service last year so 
I have even less opportunity to take it back up now as it'd be an extra 
cost to do so.  That means the gmane.org list2news service is about my 
only use, now, and that's (nearly) all text.  As such, tho I've not tried 
it recently, kde's knode would probably do the trick for me about as well 
as pan does, and there's other Linux news clients out there as well, if/
when pan ceases to be a viable option.  Plus gmane's all mailing lists 
(and rss feeds, gwene) anyway, so I could either switch to the mailing-
list-native format or use the same webmail that so many others do and thus 
do web format for my lists, if it came to that.

Really, like it or not as us old fogies will, nntp itself is slowly fading 
into history, so it's no surprise pan as an nntp client, is fading with 
it.  I do hope that pan finds that white-knight maintainer and it's 
certainly sad to watch it die, but if that white-knite doesn't appear, 
when the time comes, I'll survive without it, as I suppose everyone here 
will.

Meanwhile, this post wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention again how 
thankful I am, and I guess most here are, that KHaley has taken the 
interest that he has, providing the community repo and aggregating all the 
patches as they've appeared, in addition to working on new ones.  That's 
significant service in itself, and will make the job of any white-knight 
that should appear far easier than it'd otherwise be, in addition to 
helping pan continue to in itself extending pan's community activity and 
thus claim to life. =:^)

-- 
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