[Pan-users] Re: Folders: gone forever?

[Duncan]

Charles Sullivan <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun,
18 May 2008 15:38:57 -0400:

> With older versions of PAN I could move Usenet newsgroup messages or
> threads of special interest to folders for later reference.  They
> appeared in these folders the same way as in the newsgroup.
> 
> This feature was lost somewhere along the way - can we ever expect to
> get it back?

That was in old-pan as you said, but has not been added to the newer, 
recoded from scratch (and in C++ instead of C, so different language now) 
versions, 0.90+.

However, previously, pan deleted post headers/overviews when they expired 
off the news server.  The default cache size was (and still is) 10 MB so 
at default, the messages themselves were long gone by then anyway, altho 
one could at the time set the cache to a different size.

The way pan works now is much different.  It has a single list of groups 
regardless of the number of servers configured, and normally fetches from 
all of them as it can, instead of only one at once unless you manually 
switch servers and setup more connections as it used to do.

While the expiration is still per server (something that doesn't really 
make sense now), if a group exists on more than one server, the posts 
seem to expire at the /earliest/ setting for that group.  However, the 
expiration is set locally, and is no longer dependent on the server.  If 
you have all servers carrying that group set to never expire, the message 
remains listed in pan until disk corruption or something kills it.

The cache can still be set manually, altho there's no longer a GUI option 
for it.  Charles decided that was too complex an option to put in the 
GUI, so it's now only changeable by editing the preferences.xml file 
directly.  (There are a number of other, similarly non-GUI but manually 
changeable configs, too.  You can set >4 connections per server, if your 
server allows it, for instance, by editing servers.xml as appropriate.)

It's possible to run a multiple gigabyte cache if you want.  I have a 12 
gig cache here.  It works fine.

Thus, with a manually settable cache size and with no expiration if 
that's the way you want it, you can actually leave posts in their 
existing group, and they don't disappear on you any more (save for disk 
corruption or the like), as long as you don't ever let the cache get 
full.  I run separate binary and text pan instances (set the PAN_HOME 
environmental variable to point to a location other than the default 
~/.pan2, and you can run different instances pointed at different configs 
and caches), with separate caches so the binaries don't flood out the 
text cache, and I've been saving all posts in my text groups since I set 
it up that way, August 2006 for one server, which definitely doesn't have 
posts still on the server from back then.

So it's now possible to save them in-place, while it wasn't possible 
before.

Of course, one can also save the raw text posts as *.msg files if 
desired.  Pan doesn't do anything with them, but you can open them in a 
text editor or whatever, or for binary posts, put them thru a decoder.  
If it's just a few reference posts, you could try that.

Or... do what I do with reference posts (in addition to keeping them 
around in pan now), and forward them via mail to yourself.  Actually, you 
don't even have to go that far.  Just pretend you're mailing them, and 
since pan now uses your configured mail client to send the message, it'll 
open there, and you can save it off to a mail folder without even sending 
it anywhere, if you'd like.

-- 
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