Re: [Pan-users] can't donate to support PAN development?

[Duncan]

David Chmelik posted on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 02:21:02 +0000 as excerpted:

> On the PAN site, I tried donating (‘tip jar’ to Charles) to support
> development, but some days/weeks later, Paypal said it was cancelled...

[I've been off the lists for a few days...]

Hmm... Charles was the long-time pan primary dev, but he hasn't been 
active on pan for some years now, so perhaps he decided pan-related tips 
to him weren't appropriate any longer...

Actually, current development status is... interesting.  As I said, 
Charles has long ago left pan development to others.

Petr Kovar is in charge of pan at both gnome and the pan.rebelbase.com 
website, but he's actually more comfortable as a translator and doesn't 
claim to be a code dev, so while he takes patches and push requests from 
others and does testing and release management, he depends on others for 
any big coding jobs.

Some time after Charles left, Heinrich Muller did some heavy coding and 
added several until then still missing features including binary posting 
and the optional automated actions based on scores, but he hasn't been 
around for awhile either.

Since then, it has mostly been the odd patch to keep pan building and 
running against the latest libraries, along with some tweaks necessary to 
kill some gtk3 bugs as gtk2 slides deeper into maintenance-only mode and 
toward eventual obsolescence.  Those sorts of patches tend to be 
submitted by code-literate users or distro maintainers running into the 
bugs themselves or getting user reports about them, and while they do 
keep pan working, they're more maintenance than real continued 
development.

But... (a) even when Charles was lead dev, development tended to be in 
fits and starts, with quiet periods of a year or two between mad 
development and introduction of new features, so /that's/ nothing new, 
and (b) with Heinrich's completion of the binary posting and automated 
action features, arguably, pan is /reasonably/ mature and feature-
complete anyway, so maybe it's mature and maintenance-mode is to be 
expected at this point, especially with fewer people doing news these 
days compared to a decade or two ago.  In general, NNTP seems to be going 
the way of the gopher protocol, and it's just not interesting for most 
devs these days.  Sad, really, but OTOH, NNTP's obscurity has always been 
both a blessing and a curse, limiting the attention of the masses and 
with it the attention of the censors and copyright patrol, but even in 
its heyday also limiting the attention of possible developers and the 
degree to which ISPs were willing to provide NNTP servers, etc.  Oh, 
well...

[As for me, I'm not a dev either, tho I know enough about it to speak the 
lingo to some extent and to often be able to read and/or modify patches 
and mostly follow a git log, which comes in handy for the packages, 
including pan, that I build from live-git on my gentoo machines.  And 
I've been on this list for over a decade and a half now, including a 
period when I was more or less keeping the lights on as Charles had left 
and no one had yet volunteered to step up as Petr and Heinrich did.  So 
I'm sort of the historian on the list, and can often explain to new 
people on the list, users or devs, how and why pan works the way it does, 
because in many cases I was there when the feature was first discussed or 
introduced.  But not being a dev I really can't do much with the code, 
other than test live-git pan and sometimes apply and test or run patches 
mostly created by others.]

-- 
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