[Pan-users] Re: Re: Re: a question..

[Duncan]

marco stagno <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu,
01 Jun 2006 10:33:33 +0200:

>> The score file is the config that tells pan what items to score up  
>> or down
>> and by how much, thus letting it assign scores based on the  
>> relevant items
> 
> (...)
> 
> thank you for your precious info; I have to 'learn' how use pan and  
> scorefile, since I come from Agent and I was using it in a different  
> way (but I'll do) :)
> 
> Pan is the better (IMHO) newsreader available on *nix systems and I  
> need it to use the same data under mac osx and Linux/Debian :)

BTW, I took a look around the new-pan scoring and filtering, and while
yes, scoring works the same, unfortunately, there's now no /rules/ that I
can find a way to set up, to actually /do/ anything with those scores (or
anything else, like dates, or attachments, or...).  Sure, one can use the
view-filters to view the various score zones, and the preferences allows
them to be colored differently if displayed, but there's no way to
programmatically set up ignored to be auto-deleted or watched to be
auto-downloaded, as was possible with old-pan (0.14.x) using its rules. 

Either that, or if there is, I couldn't find it.  The new pan is supposed
to have a simpler and more intuitive menu layout, but I find it not -- I
frequently find myself looking under every menu for some function I want,
because it's not where I expect it to be.  Sometimes I find it, sometimes
not.  Once I expected it to be in preferences and it was in the view menu
toggles (the setting to toggle graphical smilies on and off -- I like to
see them as originally typed).

It a lot of ways new-pan is still much less functional than the old pan.
It has come an amazing way in a few short weeks, and the base is more
modular and therefore simpler to maintain, so it should be far easier to
add new features, and better yet, to track down and resolve bugs, and do
those added features without adding bugs in unrelated code.  Further, the
multi-server base is there and solid, far better than the previous
arrangement.  However, there remains a quite away to go before it's as
finished and functional as the old C version was, even with its warts. 

Still, at the rate it has been progressing since 0.90's introduction less
than ten weeks ago, 1.0 by the end of the year seems actually possible, a
rather drastic change from what appeared to be a virtually dead project
three months ago, or even from the regular releases of the 0.11 thru 0.13
series, when 1.0 was essentially "bluesky" -- so far off one couldn't
predict it would even happen, let alone have any idea when.



-- 
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