[Pan-users] Feature request: poor man's multi-server support

[Jim Reiss]

Recently I was dealing with a set of multi-part binary files, some of
which were supposedly complete as far as the server was concerned, but
one article out of dozens had a bad checksum.  It occurred to me to try
to download the bad segment from a different news service, but because
all of the articles were in the cache I had to delete that bad article.
I discovered that just deleting it didn't work, because Pan thought it
should be there and screamed like crazy.  If I exited pan and then deleted
it I could download just the bad article from the other server and the
file was assembled correctly.

So, I was thinking that in the case of a checksum error Pan could remove
that article from the cache automatically, and then users who have
access to other servers (possibly even with a single USENET provider)
could switch to another server before the other articles expire from
the cache and quickly resolve this sort of thing.  It's not true
multi-server support, but it doesn't require a new database or a huge
redesign, at least in my casual estimation, and would make it easier to
pull articles from more than one server.

Just seemed like a good idea after I had to kill pan so many
times...please let me know if there's already an option for this that I
missed.  I tried deleting the article but that killed the header too so
I had to redownload all the headers to get the right one.