Re: [Pan-users] Re: [PATCH] Make 'get new headers' the default in the Get Headers dialog

[Per Hedeland]

walt <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:47:03 +0000, walt wrote:
>
>> ...pan treats a subscribed group (with no unread articles) exactly the same
>> way it treats a new group that you've never read before -- but they are
>> not at all the same...
>
>Oops -- important correction.  Pan treats a subscribed group with *no* articles
>the same as a new group.  This happens only when you 'delete' all articles on
>leaving the group.  (Not the same as marking the group as 'read').
>
>This seems like a quick fix for a brilliant programmer like Charles.
>(For *me* -- maybe a bit longer ;o)

Or a quick behavioral change for you?:-) I.e. stop deleting the articles
and start marking the group as read instead. Personally I've always
found the "delete article" function slightly bizarre (even annoying,
because I've occasionally done it by mistake and had some pain to
"undelete" the article again) - you can delete e-mail messages in your
personal mailbox but you can't *really* delete news postings, except
your own, by canceling, but that's obviously a different thing - and
these days it doesn't work very well either. (Actually I can imagine
that a newbie would mistakenly believe that "delete" *is* "cancel".)

What you do is just tell Pan "Forget you ever saw this article and give
me a view of the group that doesn't match reality" - what's the point,
other than possibly making things be slightly faster than "mark read" (I
haven't measured it, but I would assume that there is some penalty for
keeping info about the read articles around)? Obviously, when marking
read as a "substitute" for deleting, you'd have the "match only unread"
filter active (which seems natural to me in any case) - but you can e.g.
"undelete" all the old articles by simply toggling the filter instead of
having to go back to the server to retrieve the info that you've thrown
away, and then "delete" them all again with another toggle.

And with this style of usage, the popup is quite reasonable even for
subscribed groups - it appears when you haven't read the group for a
"long" time (I assume it's when all your read articles have expired on
the server) - and then you may very well *not* want all the "headers"
retrieved.

--Per Hedeland