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

[Duncan]

Charles Sullivan <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue,
20 May 2008 12:27:12 -0400:

> Has Charles abandoned further development of PAN?

No.  However, he has a big tendency to work on it in fits and starts.  
Before the rewrite appeared, it had been over a year (IIRC) since any 
release, and that had been a couple minor bug fixes, over two years since 
he'd done any major work on it.  Two years is the rule of thumb for 
beginning to consider it abandoned code for many distributions, since at 
that point it's often getting stale and difficult to build with current 
gcc against current libraries and other dependencies, and I and other pan 
loyalists were beginning to deal with what was definitely looking like 
abandoned code, preparing ourselves to at least temporarily give up hope 
for pan and go looking for something else, or to seriously start looking 
for someone else to adopt the code, or something.  That wasn't the first 
time development has pretty much stopped for months at a time, but it 
/was/ the first time at least since I had been using pan (starting with 
0.11.something, GNOME 1.x version, early 2002 IIRC, so it has been 
awhile) that it was /so/ long.

Then Charles appears with the rewrite, which he had apparently been 
working on privately for most of that two years, but hadn't wanted to say 
anything as he didn't want to get hopes up.

After the rewrite went public, things went gung ho in an obviously not 
sustainable by a single dev over the long term rush of development -- 
weekly betas.  Very surprisingly to me at least, he continued that hectic 
pace for somewhat over a year, not /quite hitting a weekly release 
average, but certainly better than a two-week average, with a total of 43 
releases (0.90-0.132).  I'm sure no one with any development experience 
at all expected him to keep that up for that long, when he was doing most 
of the work (others helped and provided some patches, but...), and it was 
after all a volunteer project he was doing and continues to do in his 
"spare" time.

He took a well earned break after that, long after I expected, but I 
expected it to be a couple months, then he'd come back but at a slower 
pace.  Only it has been... well, 0.132 was released on Aug 1, 2007, 
according to pan's home page, so... nearly 10 months now, without hardly 
a peep.

I run the SVN version here, and it hasn't had much work either.  There's 
been some translation updates, but that's the GNOME translators, not 
Charles.

That said, he has apparently still been active in the GNOME community.  
As I said I'm not a GNOME person but for (GTK) pan, but apparently, 
Transition is a GTK/GNOME bittorrent client, that had stagnated and that 
Charles apparently has been quite active on in the mean time.

Back to pan.  It /had/ reached a sort of a good pause point.  The new 
version is quite functional altho there are still a couple features still 
missing as compared to old-pan (including a replacement for the old 
rules, with which one could automate delete of ignored articles and 
download of watched articles, something many of us still miss).  Charles 
had apparently intended to shoot for the magic 1.0 as the next stable, 
one of the reasons he started at 0.90 (never expecting 40-some betas in 
~14 months, maybe 9, before 1.0), but it didn't happen that way.

Meanwhile, there are still a couple obscure but non-trivial bugs that 
really need fixed before a real stable, only they are hard to pin down.  

The big one is one where (apparently) crosspostings from a followed 
group, to one that hasn't been followed, can then make it impossible to 
ever get updates on the previously unfollowed group if one decides to 
subscribe there.  I've run into this here with the Gentoo groups (mailing 
lists as newsgroups) on gmane.  A couple new lists/groups were started, 
but due to cross-posting, pan simply ignores them.  I can subscribe to 
them, but pan never actually downloads anything, even if I tell it to get 
all headers.  The symptoms are very similar to those one might see if the 
server reset its xref numbers, only that isn't the case here and fetching 
all headers would normally get them in that case even if they appeared as 
already read.  Only with this bug, even fetching all headers doesn't 
bring anything in.  If I point pan at a clean config, everything comes in 
as it should, but then I lose track of all the messages I've saved and 
their status.

But it doesn't happen in /all/ such cases, only sometimes.  Others have 
reported the issue in slightly different circumstances, but it doesn't 
happen to everyone.

Anyway, with this and a couple other bugs (I don't seem to have), it 
/was/ a rather decent point to pause for a while and let usage chase out 
this and some of the other bugs, before (hopefully) a final push to a 
stable version, 1.0 or not.

But now development seems paused again.  Given the history, there's 
little doubt Charles will eventually get back to pan and it'll go gang 
busters for a few months again, but I don't believe even Charles has a 
good idea when that might be.

So I guess that's the answer to your question, further development isn't 
abandoned, just paused, but it's anyone's guess when it'll startup again, 
tho when it does, it'll probably go very well for awhile, before pausing 
once again.

It'd sure be nice if I had the skills to help with development, not just 
on the lists/groups...

BTW, I've lost track of whether it was here or another group, but talking 
about pan and alternatives with someone, they hinted that klibido now 
handles text and posting in addition to binary downloads, all it did last 
I checked it out.  I don't know as I've not used it for awhile and 
haven't yet gotten the confirmation that I asked for on whether I was 
reading him right, but I know it /was/ pretty nice, if a bit raw being a 
pretty new app, for binary downloading, back when I used it last.  
Particularly for those with KDE already on their system, it may well be 
worth checking out, as if it's as sweet at text and posting as it was on 
binary downloading, it'll be one sweet client, and could well leave pan 
in the dust.  But it sounds a bit too good to be true.  We'll see, I 
suppose.

-- 
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