Re: [Pan-users] An obscure feature request for Heinrich :)

[Duncan]

walt posted on Sat, 16 Jun 2012 18:20:41 -0700 as excerpted:

> During my attempt to debug pan.ssl, I set the number of connections to
> zero for one of my for-pay servers.
> 
> I just tried to post via that same server and pan gave me no clue that
> my attempted post had failed.  That left me wondering why my post never
> appeared.
> 
> Thanks Heinrich.

The zero-connections case is an interesting one.  Earlier on (after the 
rewrite but still under Charles), pan allowed it, but would constantly 
popup warnings against the server because it didn't see zero as special, 
meaning that the user really wanted no connections, but simply as don't 
actually make any connections, but still create (obviously stalled) tasks.

That didn't seem to make a lot of sense to a lot of users, including me, 
and there was a request for a way to temporarily disable a server (say if 
one's quota had run out for the month), so the obvious solution was to 
use zero connections as a way to simply tell pan to ignore that server, 
while still keeping it configured and re-enablable later.

So that's what was implemented.  IDR exactly when, but I /think/ it was 
one of the patches khaley took during the period many users were using 
his repo as there had been no action on the official gnome repo for some 
time (which would have put it after Charles, but before Petr and 
definitely before Heinrich).

I'm actually using that functionality here for a slightly different 
purpose these days.  My ISP dropped its news service maybe 2-3 years ago 
now, but I had several years of archives for my regular cox.* newsgroups 
saved up (no-expire for that server, in my pan text instance, with only 
about a gig out of a 5 gig or so cache used, so neither headers nor 
messages were expired) and don't want them killed just because cox 
dropped the service.  Actually, cox's outsourced provider kept the 
service alive for free for cox users for about six more months as a 
promotion, but when they too dropped it and I could no longer get access, 
I simply set the account to zero connections, basically permanently.  
Those groups are now read-only local-cache unless/until I sign up with a 
provider that happens to still carry them (assuming they're not either 
abandoned entirely or spam wastelands by then).  So "temporarily 
disabled" is pretty much "permanently disabled, but I still want them 
archived", in my case.


So whatever is done, let's not damage the ability of "zero connections" 
to work for telling pan that that server should be disabled, no attempts 
made to connect, and at least normally, no tasks queued for it or 
warnings about it, because something set to zero connections is 
deliberately disabled.

That said, article posting warnings are arguably an exception.  Because 
of the way pan handles choosing which server to post to, via posting 
profile, with the posting profile chosen per group, not a direct server 
chosen per group, it's quite plausible that a user could entirely forget 
that a particular posting profile is set to post to a now disabled 
server, and that said posting profile is the one he used for a group so 
it's that now disabled server it's set to post thru.

Thus, ONLY for posts to disabled servers (but DEFINITELY NOT for get 
headers), an exception could be made, such that a warning is generated if 
the post is set to be made to a 0-connection/disabled server.

If it's not too difficult to handle that as an exception to otherwise no 
warnings at all about 0-connection servers.  Because I know I'm not the 
only one who USES that server-disable feature, and it would be, and was 
before, VERY annoying to have stalled tasks, etc, for a server we had 
deliberately set to 0 connections, thus, in our minds at least, 
deliberately disabling it.

-- 
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