Re: [Pan-users] Character code page used in Pan (old) postings

[Duncan]

Maurice Batey posted on Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:58:45 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:29:59 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
>> that'd involve watching the list for posts such as yours about old-pan,
>> and responding to them as best you could.
> 
>   I do that already!

=:^)

> I have tried pan2 (well, a couple of years ago) and decided I preferred
> the way that pan1 worked.
> Perhaps it has changed for the better, and I should give it another
> run...

The biggest change from old-pan is the (mostly) transparent server 
handling, having all groups in one big list regardless of server.  AFAIK 
there's no pure-server issues related to that, but people did take 
advantage of a side-effect of that to categorize their subscriptions, 
since neither old nor new pan has categories, and those subscribed to a 
large number of lists can find the single long lists of subscribed groups 
isn't particularly optimal for them.

That workaround for the lack of categories doesn't work with new-pan 
since all groups are combined in a single list now, not one per server, 
but there's another workaround that works as well for me at least (better 
in some ways since it allows separate settings per "category", once I set 
it up:

What I've done here for categories is take advantage of the fact that pan 
checks the PAN_HOME environmental variable when it starts, using it as a 
pointer to pan's data dir in place of the default ~/.pan2.  With a couple 
small wrapper scripts that set PAN_HOME appropriately (and that I use for 
a few other settings now that they're there), I'm able to run a different 
pan instance, complete with its own settings, for each "category".  Here, 
I simply use text, test, and bin (binaries) as my categories, but of 
course that's purely personal preference.

I believe all current releases allow multiple pan sessions to be run at 
once, but a reasonably recent change in git now tests for another running 
pan instance and shuts down if it exists, as the simplest fix for a bug 
involving accidentally starting a second instance using the same data 
dir.  That's a bit frustrating here, but I only do the text instance at 
all regularly any more, so it hasn't bothered me as much as it would 
someone regularly using multiple separate pan sessions, as I used to.  
I've been going to investigate how it's doing that with a eye toward a 
workaround (if it's a socket listener in $TMP as used for example with 
claws-mail, setting $TMP just as I set the data dir var should work, just 
as it does with claws-mail, which I run two instances of, one for mail, 
one with the appropriate plugin as my feed reader). or filing a bug to 
create a mechanism that can be worked around if I don't find any, but 
I've not done so yet.

-- 
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