[Pan-devel] Re: How is development going?

[Ben Bullock]

On Sat, 31 May 2008 12:32:49 +0000, Duncan wrote:

> I'm not a dev so can't help you on that, but I can say there's a thread
> on it on the user group.  FWIW, someone said and others have verified
> that the problem only occurs if pan has to wrap the text.  If the text
> comes in pre-wrapped, pan handles it fine.  Maybe that'll help you with
> what's going on in the code.  If so and you get a fix you are sure of, I
> believe there's a bug filed that you could submit a patch on.
> 
> If you can't figure it out, at least there's a work-around.  Maybe with
> it the patch will be too much trouble to worry about.

My workaround is of the form "comment out the bit where it calls the
text massager" form:

ben /usr/local/src/pan-0.132/pan/gui 507 $ diff post-ui.cc post-ui.cc.~3~ 
1543c1543
<     //    s = TextMassager().fill (s);
---
>     s = TextMassager().fill (s);

>> Also I very
>> badly wanted to turn off the "text massager" because I want to post to
>> computer language groups and having the quoted text massaged results in
>> a complete mess when the quoted content is formatted computer code, so
>> I fixed the problem by just completely commenting out the part where
>> the text massager is called. But what's really required is to have an
>> option where the text massager can be switched on or off according to
>> preferences, and I don't know how to do that.
> 
> You're talking about the text wrapper? 

Well, I'm talking about the thing called a text massager in the source
code. It lives in the file pan/usenet-utils/text-massager.cc. If you
go to a programming group and try to follow up a post you may see the
problem in the quoted material.

> On post display, of course, you
> can toggle that with the menu item

As far as I know, the problem I'm talking about is different - the text 
massager alters quoted text, not the text that I newly create.

> (and I believe the default accel is
> "w" for wrap, but I'm not sure as I long ago changed a bunch of accels
> using the accels.txt dump, and no longer am sure of /any/ of the
> defaults).

On a software project like this, if you are going to make changes, it
might save you some headaches later to use something like Subversion
or a similar version control system to keep track of changes. I don't
know what version system the developers of Pan are using - there
doesn't seem to be any public system mentioned on the web site at
http://pan.rebelbase.com/.